greenpagan

2009-01-15T13:43:00.000-08:00

2008-05-14T07:40:00.000-07:00

For Harry Warshaw, My Father (1917-2008)

2008-05-04T05:06:00.000-07:00

I. The Note to the Mourners

Those attending will have to forgive Jay, his son, for not being here today. His father’s passing has been more than he can bear and he is not in the best of health.

Hopefully, he’ll be able to make a visit at some time in the not too distant future.

He thanks you all for coming.

II. The Commemorative Poem to My Parents

To Be Read At Old Montefiore Cemetery, St. Albans Queens, NY at the funeral of Harry Warshaw (born-Oct. 17, 1917 died-Apr. 29, 2008) to be held on the morning of Sunday May 4th, 2008.

For My Mother and Father

They’re together now. Harry and Evelyn.

I see them young and beautiful and healthy

As they were when in the first full bloom of their true love.

She welcomes him into the Garden

Where they embrace and rest a while and rise again

In the new day under a New Sun

Where Love is stronger than Death.

Love, that reverential bridge connecting

Life to Life.
----
Written by Jay Warshaw
Tues. Apr. 29, 2008
Boca Raton, FL

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III. The Tribute to My Father

Harry passed away after a long courageous battle against many illnesses. He would have been 91 years old in October.

Born in the Bronx, brought up in “battling” Bensonhurst Brooklyn, he was a fighter to the end.

He had been an athlete--an inveterate handball player in particular, frequenting the legendary rough-and-tumble handball courts of Brighton Beach Brooklyn -- a soldier, an airman, a combat veteran of the Second World War, flying many missions in defense of his country--you could say he was 'The Last of the Flying Warshawskys'.

And he was a “soldier” too of another kind in the sometimes harrowing knock-down drag-out contests of New York’s Garment Industry and making a living in Manhattan in general.

While he worked hard he tried to find time for others. He knew how important it was to spend time with children. He managed and coached Little League Baseball. He often joined in the games of the kids on the street and taught them how to throw and catch a baseball or a football the best way he knew.

He never articulated it in so many words but by virtue of his example he believed your time was the most valuable thing you could give others. Ever the good trooper, in his long prime he rarely missed a family function, not because it was expected he attend, but because he enjoyed the company of his family and friends, no matter the celebration, whether the occasions were births, bar-mitzvahs, bat-mitzvahs or marriages.

And when it was time to bury the dead he was there to pay his respects and comfort the bereaved

He loved and honored his parents. He loved his entire family; his country and the Jewish People.

He loved life.

He loved good jokes, even though sometimes he might've told a bad one.

He did more good than bad.

He was human. He was one of us. He leaves an honorable name.

-- written by Jay Warshaw

Sat. May 3rd, 2008

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HAPPY PASSOVER -- SHALOM

2008-04-19T14:26:00.000-07:00

NUKE THE GARBAGE…!

2008-03-25T13:54:00.000-07:00

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an area of debris in the North Pacific Gyre.

The center of the North Pacific Gyre is relatively stationary region of the Pacific Ocean (the area it occupies is often referred to as the horse latitudes) and the circular rotation around it draws waste material in. This has led to the accumulation of flotsam and other debris in huge floating 'clouds' of waste which have taken on informal names, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the Plastic soup, the Eastern Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex. While historically this debris has biodegraded, the gyre is now accumulating vast quantities of plastic and marine debris. Rather than biodegrading, plastic photodegrades, disintegrating in the ocean into smaller and smaller pieces. These pieces, still polymers, eventually become individual molecules, which are still not easily digested.[1] Some plastics photodegrade into other pollutants. The floating particles also resemble zooplankton, which can lead to them being consumed by jellyfish, thus entering the ocean food chain. In samples taken from the gyre in 2001, the mass of plastic exceeded that of zooplankton (the dominant animal life in the area) by a factor of six. Many of these long-lasting pieces end up in the stomachs of marine birds and animals.[2]

For several years ocean researcher Charles Moore has been investigating a concentration of floating plastic debris in the North Pacific Gyre. He has reported concentrations of plastics on the order of 3,340,000 pieces/km² with a mean mass of 5.1kg/km² collected using a manta trawl with a rectangular opening of 0.9x0.15m² at the surface. Trawls at depths of 10m found less than half, consisting primarily of monofilament line fouled with diatoms and other plankton.[3]

The size estimate of the patch varies depending on the source, with some claiming that it's twice as large as the continental United States.[4] Researcher Dr Marcus Eriksen believes the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is in fact two massive areas of swirling rubbish that are linked. Eriksen says the gyre stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the coast of California, across the Northern Pacific to near the coast of Japan[5].

Occasionally, shifts in the ocean currents release flotsam lost from cargo ships into the currents around the North Pacific Gyre, leading to predictable patterns of garbage washing up on the shores around the outskirts of the gyre. The most famous was the loss of approximately 80,000 Nike sneakers and boots from the ship Hansa Carrier in 1990: the currents of the gyre distributed the shoes around the shores of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and Hawaii over the following three years. Similar cargo spills have involved 29,000-30,000 plastic yellow ducks, blue turtles and green frogs bathtub toys in 1992 and hockey equipment in 1994. These events have become a major source of data on global-scale ocean currents. Various institutions have asked the public to report the landfall locations of the objects (trainers, rubber ducks, etc.) that wash up as a method of tracking surface waters' response to the deeper ocean currents.[6] [7]

The gyre is discussed in Alan Weisman's The World Without Us as an example of the near-indestructibility of discarded plastic.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]

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2008-03-09T04:31:00.000-07:00

From the ‘Things I Can’t Post’ files...

2008-03-05T23:32:00.000-08:00

Futility Recaptured

2008-03-03T16:37:00.000-08:00

I had some dream poems on the top of my tongue
They didn’t fade I put them down
But the computer rebelled eating them
And my memory betrayed me

I reconcile myself with beliefs
That they still exist somewhere out there
Or somewhere on the hidden darknesses
Of the hard drive
Knowing deep down that in fact
They are gone forever

But maybe that’s okay
Why should they be any different
Than this poor flesh or this poor earth

-- GP

====

© JSW 2008

Running the World

2008-03-02T05:26:00.000-08:00

Well did you hear, there’s a natural order.
Those most deserving will end up with the most.
That the cream cannot help but always rise up to the top,
Well I say: Shit floats.
If you thought things had changed,
Friend you’d better think again,
Bluntly put in the fewest of words,
Cunts are still running the world,
Cunts are still running the world.
Now the working classes are obsolete,
They are surplus to societies needs,
So let ‘em all kill each other,
And get it made overseas.
That’s the word don’t you know,
From the guys thats running the show,
Lets be perfectly clear boys and girls,
Cunts are still running the world,
Cunts are still running the world.
Oh feed your children on Cray fish and Lobster tails,
Find a school near the top of the league,
In theory I respect your right to exist,
I will kill ya if you move in next to me,
Ah it stinks, it sucks, it’s anthropologically unjust,
But the takings are up by a third, Oh So
Cunts are still running the world,
Cunts are still running the world.
Your free market is perfectly natural,
Or do you think that I’m some kind of dummy,
It’s the ideal way to order the world,
Fuck the morals, does it make any money?
And if you don’t like it? Then leave.
Or use your right to protest on the street,
Yeah, use your rights but don’t imagine that it’s heard, Oh no no,
Cunts are still running the world,
Cunts are still running the world.

© Jarvis Cocker

McCain 4 Prez...Whaaa...?

2008-02-18T15:22:00.000-08:00

John McCain 2008 Presidential Election Republican presidential nominee political humor social satire

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MORE NEWS, COMMENTARY, SATIRE & OTHER STUFF AT NEWSVINE.

HAPPY ST. VALENTINE’S DAY…SUCKERS…!

2008-02-13T18:03:00.000-08:00

GOOD LUCK TO ALL YOUSE LOVE-SICK LOVE-BOYDS…

Happy St. Valentine's Day St. Valentine's Day St. Valentine's Day Massacre Al Capone humor satire

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MORE NEWS, COMMENTARY, SATIRE & OTHER STUFF AT NEWSVINE.

SAVE DARFUR--NOW!

2008-02-11T23:13:00.000-08:00

Save Darfur Darfur U.N. United Nations Activism Direct Action Africa genocide U.N. peacekeepers

THE DAILY FLOOZY

2008-02-11T16:41:00.000-08:00

George W. Bush Checks Into Rehab…With Amy Winehouse…!!!

To Amy

I want to see you nude
Wearing nothing but a snood

I want to see you weird
Wearing nothing but a beard

I want to see you off
I want to watch you cough

Don’t you hear what I’m tellin’
Don’t you know what I’m sellin’

Can’t you smell
What I’m smellin’ baby

Don’t you know
They’ll never stop me
From smellin’ you

-- GP

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george w. bush amy winehouse social satire political humor celebrities rehab

You’re not well-informed until you click on the banner below to visit:

2008-02-11T05:15:00.000-08:00

One Hundred Years of 'Insane' McCain…?

2008-01-30T04:19:00.000-08:00

“Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.” -- John McCain, GOP fund-raiser, Washington D.C., June 1998

“I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.” -- McCain statement about his North Vietnamese prison guards made on board his campaign bus. San Francisco Chronicle (18 February 2000)

A video posted on YouTube of a Jan. 3 appearance in Derry, NH, has presidential candidate John McCain responding to a question about whether US troops could be in Iraq 50 years: "Make it 100. We've been in Japan for 60 years, we've been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That would be fine with me."

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Afternotes:

“Iraq: 100 years of occupation?”

politics 2008-election John-McCain social satire political humor Florida primary Republicans GOP

Goodbye Rudy Tuesday...

2008-01-29T12:24:00.001-08:00

"Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority." -- Rudolph Giuliani, quoted in The New York Times (March 20, 1994)

"He is a small man in search of a balcony." -- Jimmy Breslin, quoted by Paul Slansky in "'Giuliani Time!': The Rudy Quiz", The New Yorker, December 17, 2007

Rudy Giuliani 2008 election political satire political humor Republicans GOP Florida primary

STATE OF THE UNION

2008-01-29T08:23:00.001-08:00

“Money trumps peace, sometimes.” -- George W. Bush (Press Conference by the President, February 14, 2007)

Bush State of the Union Dubya "W" Dumbya politics political satire political commentary political humor

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MORE NEWS, COMMENTARY, SATIRE & OTHER STUFF AT NEWSVINE.

Thank you, Dennis and Elizabeth. See you in 2012...?

2008-01-26T15:05:00.000-08:00

Dennis Kucinich Elizabeth Harper Kucinich 2008 Presidential Election Democratic Party Progressive Democrats of America politics

En Passant

2008-01-26T14:25:00.000-08:00

From brash beginnings to cold war heroism to tragic final years, former world chess champion Bobby Fischer was a magnet for public admiration and criticism. Biographer Frank Brady of St. John's University followed Fischer's complex relationship with the media.

Bobby Fischer Chess Jews Anti-Semitism Cold War Russians Soviet Union Iceland celebrity interview news Searching for Bobby Fischer Boris Spassky On the Media Ralph Ginzburg NPR

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THE DAILY STEWS

2008-01-24T08:50:00.000-08:00

“SHAME ON YOU!” NO, MR. PRESIDENT! SHAME ON YOU…!!!

bill clinton monica lewinsky hillary clinton 2008 election political satire political humor

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MORE NEWS, COMMENTARY, SATIRE & OTHER STUFF AT NEWSVINE.

2008-01-21T10:27:00.000-08:00

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

-- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963)

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MLK Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Day Civil Rights Social Justice

THE DAILY NOOSE

2008-01-16T20:28:00.000-08:00

“Go forth King George and circumcise the nasty liberal philistines…!”

Harry Reid …backdoor man…?

“Me? A beeotch…?”

“Garcon! Garcon! Table for four, s‘il vous plait…!”

Dubya George W. Bush Nancy Pelosi Harry Reid John Edwards Katie Couric Satire Politics

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MORE NEWS, COMMENTARY, SATIRE & OTHER STUFF AT NEWSVINE.

'Pork Chop' Hillary

2008-01-16T02:27:00.000-08:00

Not all that long ago I defended Hillary Clinton from low blows thrown by the official-unofficial water-carrying apparatchiks of the Corporate Mass Media.

Now sadly I have to stand fast and full square against her faction in its ill-considered targeting of Barack Obama, presumably for the sake of somebody’s idea (Mark Penn?) of political advantage. Although one would be hard-pressed to call this wave of Hillary’s “Surge” against all comers a rip-roaring success.

If the Dems split in ’08 and the sick, decrepit, virtually bed-ridden GOP wins the White House (and by unexpected rout retakes the House and Senate in the bargain ) because of it the Clinton name will live in INFAMY. Because it would have been their fault! [More]

hillary clinton barack obama political commentary political satire 2008 presidential election democrats republicans

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2007--HAPPY NEW YEAR--2008

2008-01-01T07:59:00.000-08:00

Winter is Icummen in

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, tis why I am,
Goddamm.
So 'gainst the winter's balm
Sing Goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm
Sing Goddamm, sing Goddamm,
DAMM.

-- Ezra Pound

I AM THE PEOPLE, THE MOB

2007-12-28T17:12:00.000-08:00

I AM the people--the mob--the crowd--the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is
done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
world's food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons
come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And
then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
makes me work and give up what I have. And I
forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
drops for history to remember. Then--I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
a fool--then there will be no speaker in all the world
say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a
sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob--the crowd--the mass--will arrive then.

-- Carl Sandburg

Scratchpad: Tues. 25 Dec. 2007

2007-12-25T06:54:00.000-08:00

On CSPAN this fine Christmas morning an 84 year old lady from the Great State of Oklahoma in a nice little old lady voice said something like this:

“We gotta do away with welfare! If people can’t take care of themselves they got no right to live!”

Yipes!

Merry Christmas…?

…God Rest Ye Merry, Gentle Woman…

And soon!

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news politics opinion society current affairs commentary humor Christmas C-SPAN

2007-11-22T05:08:00.000-08:00

When religion becomes fair game

2007-11-19T12:30:00.000-08:00

If candidates can court the faithful, they should be willing to answer questions of faith as well.

By Jonathan Turley
USA TODAY
November 19, 2007

In the race for the White House this year, speeches have turned sharply from the political to the biblical as Democrats have strived to close the "God gap" with Republicans over the religious vote. Yet, when pressed about their own faith or faithlessness, candidates have been less eager to answer, claiming that such questions are personal and beyond the pale. But it may be time to demand that, when politicians call to the faithful, they should have to answer to the faithful on their own religious practices.

This election, the candidates are talking so much about faith that one would think they wanted to be in the College of Cardinals rather than the Hall of Presidents. In one Republican debate, candidates spoke of their faith 16 times. Three of the 10 candidates (Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, who later dropped out, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, and Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado) have even publicly proclaimed that they did not believe in evolution.

On the Democratic side, the candidates have competed equally in the parade of the pious. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois led the way and recently proclaimed his intention to be "an instrument of God" and to create "a Kingdom right here on earth." Even the title of Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope, was taken from sermons by his controversial spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.

Other Democratic candidates have responded by proselytizing on their own divine qualifications. In one debate, the Democrats held forth on the power of prayer and the role of their faith in their public lives. Hillary Clinton has described her own "faith journey," her experiencing "the presence of the Holy Spirit on many occasions," and how she is assisted by an "extended prayer family" and "faith warriors."

There is no question that references to the Bible have been used by presidents since George Washington. More than anyone else, however, George W. Bush can be credited with making faith-based appeals not just a mantra but an agenda for modern candidates. When asked during the 2000 primary to name his favorite political philosopher, Bush immediately declared, "Christ, because he changed my heart." While perhaps a bit confused by Jesus' emergence as a political philosopher rather than religious figure, other candidates sheepishly followed suit. Ironically, it was strikingly similar to the faith-based campaigning by another national leader: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. For some reason, it seems more threatening when it is someone else's God who is guiding the head of a nation.

Uncomfortable questions

Now, all of the talk of faith has led the faithful to ask some uncomfortable questions. When asked about his multiple marriages and sketchy church-going habits, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani's campaign insisted that "the mayor's personal relationship with God is private and between him and God."

Yet, when one is campaigning evangelically, it is hard to maintain that the faithful flock should not question the shepherd. There is particular sensitivity over in the Romney camp. Mitt Romney is a former bishop and stake president (or head of a collection of congregations) in his church, but he has largely refused to discuss the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. Romney admitted last week that his staff does not want any in-depth discussion of LDS on the campaign trail. The church remains controversial with many religious voters who view it as non-Christian and polytheistic.

Even so, Romney is actively courting the faithful, including changing his positions on key moral issues, such as gay marriage, due to personal (if belated) conversions. He has called Jesus Christ "my personal Lord and savior" and alluded to the Gideon Bible as his favorite reading, leaving Mormons and non-Mormons wondering about his faith values. If religion is the most important factor in a person's life and directs his decisions on issues such as gay marriage, why should the electorate not learn about that faith?

Under this approach, the public would be equally barred from knowing about a person's views of Scientology or some apocalyptic religion that guides a candidate. Likewise, for people voting on a religious agenda, a person's faith-based promises are only as good as his or her personal faith.

Among the faithful, one subgroup has particularly pressing questions: Muslims. New York Rep. Pete King, a Giuliani adviser, proclaimed that there are "too many mosques in this country." McCain has said that he would not like to see a Muslim in the Oval Office: "I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles ... personally, I prefer someone who I know has a solid grounding in my faith." Christianity, he noted is "an important part of our qualifications to lead." Facing a torrent of criticism, he later appeared to expand the eligibility list to "Judeo-Christian" candidates — leaving only Muslims, Buddhists and every other religion as presumptively unqualified.

Voting on faith

McCain appeared to be playing to recent polls that say 37% of voters are unlikely to vote for a Mormon and 54% are unlikely to vote for a Muslim. More than 50% said they would never vote for an atheist. McCain's 95-year-old mother recently appeared with her son and attacked Mormons as a group. (McCain disassociated himself from his mom's remarks.)

It is not only the faithful who have questions. For secular Americans, the news that roughly one-third of Republican candidates do not believe in evolution was no doubt unnerving. Yet non-religious voters have been largely written off by Republicans and Democrats, despite the fact that there are 20 million atheist and non-religious citizens. When you add citizens who believe in both God and secular government, the percentage is much higher. That means that tens of millions of people might want to know what these candidates mean by creating "kingdoms" and being servants of their respective gods.

It might be time to put sensitivities aside and "out" those who run on piety while invoking privacy on the details of their own faithfulness. On infidelity or homosexuality, reporters have tended not to expose politicians unless they run on family values (such as Sens. David Vitter or Larry Craig) or invite such review (such as former presidential candidate Gary Hart).

Of course, not everyone is Bible-thumping his way to victory. Giuliani last month told a religious convention that he is frankly "not always the best example of faith." Those running on secular issues have every right to keep their religious views private.

The religiosity in the current campaigns represents an important choice by those candidates who chose sectarian over secular values in government.

Obama strongly chastised people who objected to the religiosity that has become the norm in American politics. "Secularists," he insisted, "are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square." But "believers" are equally wrong to refuse to answer questions of their beliefs once they cross that political river Jordan and begin to proselytize for the presidency. After all, in 2 Corinthians 13:5, the faithful are instructed to "examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves." Perhaps, by testing the politically pious, we can all hope for a degree of enlightenment in this election.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.

Republicans and Race

2007-11-19T07:33:00.000-08:00

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
November 19, 2007

Over the past few weeks there have been a number of commentaries about Ronald Reagan’s legacy, specifically about whether he exploited the white backlash against the civil rights movement.

The controversy unfortunately obscures the larger point, which should be undeniable: the central role of this backlash in the rise of the modern conservative movement.

The centrality of race — and, in particular, of the switch of Southern whites from overwhelming support of Democrats to overwhelming support of Republicans — is obvious from voting data.

For example, everyone knows that white men have turned away from the Democrats over God, guns, national security and so on. But what everyone knows isn’t true once you exclude the South from the picture. As the political scientist Larry Bartels points out, in the 1952 presidential election 40 percent of non-Southern white men voted Democratic; in 2004, that figure was virtually unchanged, at 39 percent.

More than 40 years have passed since the Voting Rights Act, which Reagan described in 1980 as “humiliating to the South.” Yet Southern white voting behavior remains distinctive. Democrats decisively won the popular vote in last year’s House elections, but Southern whites voted Republican by almost two to one.

The G.O.P.’s own leaders admit that the great Southern white shift was the result of a deliberate political strategy. “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization.” So declared Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, speaking in 2005.

And Ronald Reagan was among the “some” who tried to benefit from racial polarization.

True, he never used explicit racial rhetoric. Neither did Richard Nixon. As Thomas and Mary Edsall put it in their classic 1991 book, “Chain Reaction: The impact of race, rights and taxes on American politics,” “Reagan paralleled Nixon’s success in constructing a politics and a strategy of governing that attacked policies targeted toward blacks and other minorities without reference to race — a conservative politics that had the effect of polarizing the electorate along racial lines.”

Thus, Reagan repeatedly told the bogus story of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen — a gross exaggeration of a minor case of welfare fraud. He never mentioned the woman’s race, but he didn’t have to.

There are many other examples of Reagan’s tacit race-baiting in the historical record. My colleague Bob Herbert described some of these examples in a recent column. Here’s one he didn’t mention: During the 1976 campaign Reagan often talked about how upset workers must be to see an able-bodied man using food stamps at the grocery store. In the South — but not in the North — the food-stamp user became a “strapping young buck” buying T-bone steaks.

Now, about the Philadelphia story: in December 1979 the Republican national committeeman from Mississippi wrote a letter urging that the party’s nominee speak at the Neshoba Country Fair, just outside the town where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. It would, he wrote, help win over “George Wallace inclined voters.”

Sure enough, Reagan appeared, and declared his support for states’ rights — which everyone took to be a coded declaration of support for segregationist sentiments.

Reagan’s defenders protest furiously that he wasn’t personally bigoted. So what? We’re talking about his political strategy. His personal beliefs are irrelevant.

Why does this history matter now? Because it tells why the vision of a permanent conservative majority, so widely accepted a few years ago, is wrong.

The point is that we have become a more diverse and less racist country over time. The “macaca” incident, in which Senator George Allen’s use of a racial insult led to his election defeat, epitomized the way in which America has changed for the better.

And because conservative ascendancy has depended so crucially on the racial backlash — a close look at voting data shows that religion and “values” issues have been far less important — I believe that the declining power of that backlash changes everything.

Can anti-immigrant rhetoric replace old-fashioned racial politics? No, because it mobilizes the same shrinking pool of whites — and alienates the growing number of Latino voters.

Now, maybe I’m wrong about all of this. But we should be able to discuss the role of race in American politics honestly. We shouldn’t avert our gaze because we’re unwilling to tarnish Ronald Reagan’s image.

2007-11-18T07:38:00.000-08:00

-- Tamara de Lempicka

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What ‘That Regan Woman’ Knows

2007-11-18T00:47:00.000-08:00

By FRANK RICH
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
November 18, 2007

NEW Yorkers who remember Rudy Giuliani as the bullying New York mayor, not as the terminally cheerful “America’s Mayor” cooing to babies in New Hampshire, have always banked on one certainty: his presidential candidacy was so preposterous it would implode before he got anywhere near the White House.

Surely, we reassured ourselves, the all-powerful Republican values enforcers were so highly principled that they would excommunicate him because of his liberal social views, three wives and estranged children. Or a firewall would be erected by the firefighters who are enraged by his self-aggrandizing rewrite of 9/11 history. Or Judith Giuliani, with her long-hidden first marriage and Louis Vuitton ’tude, would send red-state voters screaming into the night.

Wrong, wrong and wrong. But how quickly and stupidly we forgot about the other Judith in the Rudy orbit. That would be Judith Regan, who disappeared last December after she was unceremoniously fired from Rupert Murdoch’s publishing house, HarperCollins. Last week Ms. Regan came roaring back into the fray, a silver bullet aimed squarely at the heart of the Giuliani campaign.

Ms. Regan filed a $100 million lawsuit against her former employer, claiming she was unjustly made a scapegoat for the O. J. Simpson “If I Did It” fiasco that (briefly) embarrassed Mr. Murdoch and his News Corporation. But for those of us not caught up in the Simpson circus, what’s most riveting about the suit are two at best tangential sentences in its 70 pages: “In fact, a senior executive in the News Corporation organization told Regan that he believed she had information about Kerik that, if disclosed, would harm Giuliani’s presidential campaign. This executive advised Regan to lie to, and to withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik.”

Kerik, of course, is Bernard Kerik, the former Giuliani chauffeur and police commissioner, as well as the candidate he pushed to be President Bush’s short-lived nominee to run the Department of Homeland Security. Having pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors last year, Mr. Kerik was indicted on 16 other counts by a federal grand jury 10 days ago, just before Ms. Regan let loose with her lawsuit. Whether Ms. Regan’s charge about that unnamed Murdoch “senior executive” is true or not — her lawyers have yet to reveal the evidence — her overall message is plain. She knows a lot about Mr. Kerik, Mr. Giuliani and the Murdoch empire. And she could talk.

Boy, could she! As New Yorkers who have crossed her path or followed her in the tabloids know, Ms. Regan has an epic temper. My first encounter with her came more than a decade ago when she left me a record-breaking (in vitriol and decibel level) voice mail message about a column I’d written on one of her authors. It was a relief to encounter a more mellow Regan at a Midtown restaurant some years later. She cordially introduced me to her dinner companion, Mr. Kerik, whose post-9/11 autobiography, “The Lost Son: A Life in Pursuit of Justice,” was under contract at her HarperCollins imprint, ReganBooks.

What I didn’t know then was that this married author and single editor were in pursuit of not just justice, but sex, too. Their love nest, we’d later learn, was an apartment adjacent to ground zero that had been initially set aside for rescue workers. Mr. Kerik believed his lover had every moral right to be there. As he tenderly explained in his acknowledgments in “The Lost Son” — published before the revelation of their relationship — there was “one hero who is missing” from his book’s tribute to “courage and honor” and “her name is Judith Regan.”

Few know more about Rudy than his perennial boon companion, Mr. Kerik. Perhaps during his romance with Ms. Regan he talked only of the finer points of memoir writing or about his theories of crime prevention or about his ideas for training the police in the Muslim world (an assignment he later received in Iraq and botched). But it is also plausible that this couple discussed everything Mr. Kerik witnessed at Mr. Giuliani’s side before, during and after 9/11.

Perhaps he even explained to her why the mayor insisted, disastrously, that his city’s $61 million emergency command center be located in the World Trade Center despite the terrorist attack on the towers in 1993.

Perhaps, too, they talked about the business ventures the mayor established after leaving office. Mr. Kerik worked at Giuliani Partners and used its address as a mail drop for some $75,000 that turns up in the tax-fraud charges in his federal indictment. That money was Mr. Kerik’s pay for an 11-sentence introduction to another Regan-published book about 9/11, “In the Line of Duty.” Though that project’s profits were otherwise donated to the families of dead rescue workers, Mr. Kerik’s royalties were mailed to Giuliani Partners in the name of a corporate entity Mr. Kerik set up in Delaware. He would later claim that he made comparable donations to charity, but the federal indictment charges that $80,000 he took in charitable deductions were bogus.

Amazingly, given that he seeks the highest office in the land, Mr. Giuliani will not reveal the clients of Giuliani Partners. Perhaps he has trouble remembering them all. He testified in court last year that he has no memory of a mayoral briefing in which he was told of Mr. Kerik’s association with a company suspected of ties to organized crime.

Ms. Regan’s knowledge of Mr. Giuliani isn’t limited to whatever she learned from Mr. Kerik. She used to work for another longtime Giuliani pal, Roger Ailes, the media consultant for the first Giuliani campaign in 1989 and the impresario who created Fox News for Mr. Murdoch in 1996.

A full-service mayor to his cronies, Mr. Giuliani lobbied hard to get the Fox News Channel on the city’s cable boxes and presided over Mr. Ailes’s wedding. Enter Ms. Regan, who was given her own program on Fox’s early lineup. Mr. Ailes came up with its rather inspired first title, “That Regan Woman.”

Who at the News Corporation supposedly asked Ms. Regan to lie to protect Rudy’s secrets? Her complaint does not say. But thanks to the political journal The Hotline, we do know that as of the summer Mr. Giuliani had received more air time from Fox News than any other G.O.P. candidate, much of it on the high-rated “Hannity & Colmes.” That show’s co-host, Sean Hannity, appeared at a Giuliani campaign fund-raiser this year.

Fox News coverage of Ms. Regan’s lawsuit last week was minimal. After all, Mr. Giuliani dismissed the whole episode as “a gossip column story,” and we know Fox would never stoop so low as to trade in gossip. The coverage was scarcely more intense at The Wall Street Journal, whose print edition included no mention of the suit’s reference to that “senior executive” at the News Corporation. (After bloggers noticed, the article was amended online.) The Journal is not quite yet a Murdoch property, but its editorial board has had its own show on Fox News since 2006.

During the 1990s, the Journal editorial board published so much dirt about the Clintons that it put the paper’s brand on an encyclopedic six-volume anthology titled “A Journal Briefing — Whitewater.” You’d think the controversies surrounding “America’s Mayor” are at least as sexy as the carnal scandals and alleged drug deals The Journal investigated back then. This month a Journal reporter not on its editorial board added the government of Qatar to the small list of known Giuliani Partners clients, among them the manufacturer of OxyContin. We’ll see if such journalism flourishes in the paper’s Murdoch era.

But beyond New York’s dailies and The Village Voice, the national news media, conspicuously the big three television networks, have rarely covered Mr. Giuliani much more aggressively than Mr. Murdoch’s Fox News has. They are more likely to focus on Mr. Giuliani’s checkered family history than the questions raised by his record in government and business. It’s astounding how many are willing to look the other way while recycling those old 9/11 videos.

One exception is The Chicago Tribune, which last month on its front page revisited the story of how, after Mr. Giuliani left office, his mayoral papers were temporarily transferred to a private, tax-exempt foundation run by his supporters and financed with $1.5 million from mostly undisclosed donors. The foundation, which shares the same address as Giuliani Partners, copied and archived the records before sending them back to New York’s municipal archives.

Historians told The Tribune there’s no way to verify that the papers were returned to government custody intact. Mayor Bloomberg has since signed a law that will prevent this unprecedented deal from being repeated.

Journalists, like generals, love to refight the last war, so the unavailability of millions of Hillary Clinton’s papers has received all the coverage the Giuliani campaign has been spared. But while the release of those first lady records should indeed be accelerated, it’s hard to imagine many more scandals will turn up after six volumes of “Whitewater,” an impeachment trial and the avalanche of other investigative reportage on the Clintons then and now.

The Giuliani story, by contrast, is relatively virgin territory. And with the filing of a lawsuit by a vengeful eyewitness who was fired from her job, it may just have gained its own reincarnation of Linda Tripp.

2007-11-17T17:38:00.001-08:00

Woody Talks

2007-11-17T17:29:00.000-08:00

Review by DAVID KAMP
The New York Times
November 18, 2007

CONVERSATIONS WITH WOODY ALLEN

His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking.

By Eric Lax.

Illustrated. 390 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.

MERE ANARCHY

By Woody Allen.

160 pp. Random House. $21.95.

THE INSANITY DEFENSE

The Complete Prose.

By Woody Allen.

342 pp. Random House. Paper, $15.95.

Not only does Woody Allen profess not to care one whit about his legacy as a filmmaker; he’s also fashioned some choice Woodyisms on the topic. Here’s one: “I’m a firm believer that when you’re dead, naming a street after you doesn’t help your metabolism.” Here’s another: “Rather than live on in the hearts and minds of my fellow man, I’d prefer to live on in my apartment.”

Point taken, maestro. This is the Woody we’ve come to know well: the godless, affectless, clarinet-tootling, awards-ceremony-shunning workaholic who will give neither himself nor his audience the satisfaction of sitting back and taking pleasure in his achievements. (The working title of his most acclaimed film, “Annie Hall,” was “Anhedonia,” meaning the inability to experience pleasure.)

Would it be churlish, though, to suggest that Allen is being a tad disingenuous? For if he really were indifferent to his legacy, then why would he sanction the publication of a hefty book called “Conversations With Woody Allen,” and why would he have sat for hours and hours of new interviews with Eric Lax, the man who wrote a quasi-authorized biography of him 16 years ago?

This is a legacy-burnishing project, plain and simple. Allen is a big Orson Welles fan — he tells Lax he considers “Citizen Kane” the greatest American film ever made — and “Conversations With Woody Allen” is essentially the Woodman’s chance to do his version of “This Is Orson Welles,” a magnificent book (published in 1992) that collected years of talk between the orotund “Kane” auteur and his interlocutor-protégé, Peter Bogdanovich. Lax is well positioned to play the Bogdanovich role: he first met Allen in 1971, when he interviewed the then fledgling director for an abortive New York Times Magazine profile, and has since spent a significant chunk of his adulthood in Allen’s company, sometimes on set, sometimes in the intimacy of his subject’s screening room or apartment.

“Conversations” reveals, happily, an Allen who’s game to range freely over his oeuvre. We learn that his favorites of his own films are “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” “Match Point” and “Husbands and Wives” (the last one a bit of a surprise), with “Stardust Memories” and “Zelig” ranking a notch below. Sometimes Allen’s assessments are bracingly contrarian. He expresses bafflement over the high regard in which “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan” continue to be held (“People really latched on to ‘Manhattan’ in a way that I thought was irrational,” he says) and makes a strong case for “Manhattan Murder Mystery,” his underappreciated 1993 reunion picture with Diane Keaton. In other moments, no less fascinating, he borders on the delusional. He can’t fathom, for example, how “Hollywood Ending,” a patchy, forgettable effort from 2002, “was not thought of as a first-rate, extraordinary comedy.”

In his introduction, Lax promises his book will offer “a clear view” of Allen’s transformation “from novice to one of the world’s most acclaimed filmmakers.” And it is indeed startling to witness the Woody of 1973, on the eve of the release of his mock-futurist romp “Sleeper,” getting giddy over positive advance notices from Scholastic and Seventeen magazines. (Lax claims Allen stopped reading reviews after “Annie Hall.”) It’s also telling to discover how much the younger Allen sought the approval of Gordon Willis, his cinematographer from “Annie Hall” through “Purple Rose.” Willis, late of Francis Coppola’s first two “Godfather” pictures, was arguably the bigger deal in filmmaking circles when the two men began their collaboration. When he told Allen during the making of “Annie Hall” that there was no rule against letting characters wander in and out of the frame while they talked, the director, thus emboldened, embraced this approach and turned it into a stylistic trademark.

Yet for all the measurable ways in which Allen has gone from callow neophyte to seasoned pro, Woody-the-person seems never to have changed much. Lax’s interviews are arranged not chronologically but according to broad categories related to the filmmaking process — for example, “The Idea,” “Writing It,” “Directing,” “Editing.” So even when Lax jump-cuts from 1973 to 1987 to 1989 to 2005 in the “Directing” chapter, there’s no palpable change in voice, tenor or outlook. Allen evidently emerged from Flatbush fully formed, prepackaged with abundant self-confidence and enduring obsessions with Dixieland jazz, Freudian analysis, Knicks basketball and ladies’ bosoms.

This makes for a book that’s plenty entertaining as a flip-through read but ultimately lacking in drama. “This Is Orson Welles” benefited from the tragic dimensions of its subject’s life: Welles’s early success as a boy wonder, his bitter rejection by Hollywood, his peripatetic later existence, his reduced circumstances, his unfulfilled dreams. Allen, on the other hand, just keeps hitching up his corduroys and going about his business. He hews to the same cyclical filmmaking schedule he’s been on forever, churns out a picture a year, and, if he’s lucky, the movie turns out half-decent. Or as Allen puts it, “I’d like to make a great film provided it doesn’t conflict with my dinner reservation.”

Even the one big negative associated with Allen in the public mind — his breakup with Mia Farrow and subsequent marriage to Farrow’s adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn — is something he shrugged off a long time ago. Unprompted, he brings up the subject with Lax, conflating the people who criticized the age difference between his and Mariel Hemingway’s characters in “Manhattan” with those who were up in arms about him and Soon-Yi. “Speaking of Soon-Yi,” Allen says, “it is ironic that my marriage to her, which was seen by many as so irrational, to me is the one relationship in my life that worked.”

I don’t blame Lax for not pursuing that subject further, since “Conversations With Woody Allen” is meant to be about the movies. But I do wish that the author had occasionally been less James Lipton-ingratiating and more Mike Wallace-aggressive in his line of questioning. There is, for instance, the unignorable fact that Allen is not as culturally relevant as he once was. There was a period, from “Annie Hall” (1977) to “Hannah and Her Sisters” (1986), when the release of a new Woody Allen movie was an event — when Allen, as esoterically a New York-Jewish figure as he was, was verily plugged into the zeitgeist. What happened? Why is this no longer so? And how on earth did it happen in the first place?

Given Allen’s penchant for brutal self-critique, I doubt he would take offense at such questions. But Lax never raises them. The closest we get, very late in the book, is when Allen, in a January 2000 sit-down, takes issue with the notion, put forth by the critic Richard Schickel, that his audience left him at some point. No, no, no, Allen argues: “It was that I left them; they didn’t leave me.” Eminently sane analysis or Norma Desmond-style sophistry? And which party was it, then, audience or Woody, that initiated the 2005 reconciliation that was the critically and commercially successful “Match Point”? I guess those are questions for another conversation.

One area where Allen unequivocally did leave his audience behind is in print. From the late ’60s through the ’70s, he wrote enough humorous stories and essays to fill three wonderful collections, “Getting Even,” “Without Feathers” and “Side Effects.” Like many an impressionable young fan, I read and reread these books so often — rife with genre parodies, absurdist pensées and flamboyantly prolix S. J. Perelman homages — that their contents became committed to memory. “Her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak”: those are words from a 1971 Sam Spade sendup called “Mr. Big,” and I just summoned them as automatically as if they were the lyrics to “Happy Birthday.”

Alas, Allen abandoned print humor in the ’80s. Then, around the end of the last decade, he decided to give it a go again, submitting material anew to The New Yorker, where most of his earlier print work had first appeared. He’s kept at it, and “Mere Anarchy” collects the pieces he’s written in this second phase of his literary life. Meanwhile, the earlier three collections have been combined into an anthology called “The Insanity Defense,” now out in paperback. I’ll say it again: for someone so unconcerned with his legacy, Allen sure is taking up a lot of shelf space.

“Mere Anarchy” isn’t a full return to the glory days. The Perelmanisms are sometimes laid on too thick (“The heady conflation of lilac Pinaud and stale White Owls subverted my hypothalamus”), and there’s nothing on the level of “The Kugelmass Episode,” his flawless short story from “Side Effects” about a bald City College professor who, via a magician’s cabinet, is transported into the novel “Madame Bovary.” Still, it’s good to find Allen redevoted to a form — the silly short, or “casual,” in New Yorker parlance — that few besides him and Perelman have mastered.

“Above the Law, Below the Box Springs” is a soberly presented piece of crime journalism in the detail-laden, “In Cold Blood” vein: “Homer Pugh stands 5-8 in his stocking feet, which he keeps in a large duffel bag along with his actual feet.” “How Deadly Your Taste Buds, My Sweet” is an espionage potboiler based on a real news report of a white truffle that sold for six figures at auction. In it, a femme fatale announces with urgency, “A network of gourmands originating in Istanbul and frantic to shave it over their fettuccine has infiltrated our borders.”

It may not be fashionable to say so, least of all in Woody Allen’s house, but the man, when he’s on form, is as capable as ever of delivering pleasure.

David Kamp is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair.

2007-11-17T09:17:00.000-08:00

Vote on Grand Socialist Plan Stirs Passions in Venezuela

2007-11-16T18:34:00.000-08:00

By SIMON ROMERO
The New York Times
November 17, 2007

CARACAS, Venezuela, Nov. 16 — In two weeks, Venezuela seems likely to start an extraordinary experiment in centralized, oil-fueled socialism. By law, the workday would be cut to six hours. Street vendors, homemakers and maids would have state-mandated pensions. And President Hugo Chávez would have significantly enhanced powers and be eligible for re-election for the rest of his life.

A sweeping revision of the Constitution, expected to be approved by referendum on Dec. 2, is both bolstering Mr. Chávez’s popularity here among people who would benefit and stirring contempt from economists who declare it demagogy. Signaling new instability here, dissent is also emerging among his former lieutenants, one of whom says the president is carrying out a populist coup.

“There is a perverse subversion of our existing Constitution under way,” said Gen. Raúl Isaías Baduel, a retired defense minister and former confidant of Mr. Chávez who broke with him in a stunning defection this month to the political opposition. “This is not a reform,” General Baduel said in an interview here this week. “I categorize it as a coup d’état.”

Chávez loyalists already control the National Assembly, the Supreme Court, almost every state government, the entire federal bureaucracy and newly nationalized companies in the telephone, electricity and oil industries. Soon they could control even more.

But this is an upheaval that would be carried out with the approval of the voters. While opinion polls in Venezuela are often tainted by partisanship, they suggest that the referendum could be Mr. Chávez’s closest electoral test since his presidency began in 1999, but one he may well win.

“We are witnessing a seizure and redirection of power through legitimate means,” said Alberto Barrera Tyszka, co-author of a best-selling biography of Mr. Chávez. “This is not a dictatorship but something more complex: the tyranny of popularity.”

One of the 69 amendments allows Mr. Chávez to create new administrative regions, governed by vice presidents chosen by him. Critics say the reforms would also shift funds from states and cities, where a handful of elected officials still oppose him, to communal councils, new local governing entities that are predominantly pro-Chávez.

Interviews this week on the streets here and in Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second largest city, offer a window into the strength of Mr. Chávez’s followers and the challenges of his critics. His supporters, many of whom are public servants in a bureaucracy that has recently ballooned, have flooded poor districts to campaign for the overhaul.

“The comandante should have more power because he is the force behind our revolution,” said Egda Vilchez, 51, a pro-Chávez activist, as she campaigned in favor of the new charter this week at a busy intersection in Cacique Mara, an area of slums in eastern Maracaibo.

Such statements may sound dogmatic, but they are voiced with a fervor in organized campaigning that is unmatched in richer areas of Venezuela’s largest cities, from which much of the opposition to Mr. Chávez is drawn.

Aside from a nascent student movement, which has held protests of increasing defiance in recent weeks, the middle and upper classes seem largely resigned about the outcome of a referendum that is less about specific issues than Mr. Chávez’s resilient support among the poor.

In comments after a summit of Latin American leaders this month in Chile, Mr. Chávez laid out his project in simple language. “Capitalist Venezuela is entering its grave,” he said, “and socialist Venezuela is being born.” Indeed, socialist imagery is pervasive throughout this country, from the red shirts worn by Mr. Chávez and his followers to the chant of “Fatherland, socialism or death!” repeated at the end of his rallies.

But walking into a grocery store here offers a different view of the changes washing over Venezuela. Combined with price controls that keep farmers from profitably producing some basic foods, climbing incomes of the poorest Venezuelans have stripped supermarket aisles bare of items like milk and eggs. Meanwhile, foreign exchange controls create bottlenecks for importers seeking to meet rising demand for many products.

Such imbalances plague oil economies elsewhere, with oil revenues often making it cheaper to import goods than produce them at home. But the system Mr. Chávez is creating is perhaps unique: a hybrid of state-supported enterprises and no-holds-barred capitalism in which 500,000 automobiles are expected to be sold this year.

Lacking here, for instance, is the authoritarianism one might expect in a country where billboards promoting Mr. Chávez have proliferated in the last year.

Looming above the Centro San Ignacio, a high-end shopping mall here, is one of the president hugging a child while he explains the “motors” of his revolution. Others show him kissing old women, decorating graduates of the military university and embracing an ally, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

Beneath these images, a lack of order persists at the street level, reflecting a state flush with oil money but weak when facing systemic problems like violent crime. The country had 9,568 homicides in the first nine months of this year, a 9 percent increase from the same period last year.

Private companies here, meanwhile, are in the awkward position of profiting from a growing economy even as many are dreading what is to come, their fears illustrated by the accelerating capital flight that has caused the currency, the bolívar, to plunge in value against the dollar since Mr. Chávez proposed the constitutional overhaul in August.

Sparse details as to how Mr. Chávez’s government would carry out measures a like a six-hour workday or finance a new social security system have done little for economic confidence, with Fedecámaras, the country’s main business association, urging voters to oppose the new charter “by all legal means.”

The proposals have also revealed sharp divisions among the president’s own supporters, symbolized by the sharp criticism from General Baduel, who had helped reinstall Mr. Chávez in power after a brief coup in 2002.

Marisabel Rodríguez, the president’s ex-wife and former first lady, came out against the new charter this week, saying it would lead to “absolute concentration of power.” And previously pro-Chávez governors like Ramón Martínez of Sucre State, sensing their power could be curtailed, have begun criticizing the measures.

Under the project, term limits would be abolished only for the president, not for governors or mayors. Another item raises the threshold for collecting signatures to hold a vote to recall the president, effectively shielding him from one option voters have to challenge his power under the existing Constitution of 1999.

Other measures in the project are considered progressive by both critics of Mr. Chávez and his political base, which includes leftist military officials, academics, civil servants and a large portion of the urban and rural poor.

The voting age in this demographically young country, for instance, would be lowered to 16 from 18. Discrimination based on sexual orientation would also be prohibited. Many of the items are vaguely worded, however, like one giving the president the power to create “communal cities.”

“Clearly there are positive aspects to the reform, but the government has committed a political error by trying to rush it to voters without enough discussion,” said Edgardo Lander, a sociologist at the Central University of Venezuela who is generally sympathetic to Mr. Chávez. “The opposition can argue this is illegitimate if it is approved by a low margin.”

Mr. Chávez, 53, who recently hinted at staying in power until 2031, might also be preparing for resistance here if oil revenues prove insufficient to finance his ambitions. One of the reforms allows him to declare states of emergency during which he can censor television stations and newspapers.

“Chávez wants to liquidate challenges to his rule to enable him to govern Venezuela for the rest of his life,” Manuel Rosales, governor of Zulia State and the main challenger to Mr. Chávez in presidential elections last year, said in an interview at his office in Maracaibo.

2007-11-11T16:00:00.000-08:00

Rock ’n’ Revolution

2007-11-11T13:47:00.000-08:00

By JON PARELES
Arts/Music
The New York Times
November 11, 2007

COUNTLESS rock bands have sung about rebellion. One of the few that can claim it spurred a revolution is the Plastic People of the Universe, who — starting with no political agenda — catalyzed democracy in Czechoslovakia.

The story of the Plastics (as fans call the band) is central to Tom Stoppard’s play “Rock ’n’ Roll,” although it is told from the sidelines by fictional characters. It’s a story not of activism but of whimsy treated as sedition, stubbornness met by brutality and a regime unknowingly consolidating its opposition. Repression amplified the band’s impact, though at serious personal cost to the musicians.

Throughout “Rock ’n’ Roll” music is never mere entertainment. It’s not propaganda, either; there are no political or protest songs. (The Plastics have recorded only one directly political song during their career.) Instead music is variously a refuge, a cry from the heart, a flag of defiance and a token of freedom. “The play perhaps could be called ‘It’s Not Only Rock ’n’ Roll,’” Mr. Stoppard said. “Because it’s not.”

The Plastic People of the Universe got started in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the year Soviet tanks rolled into Prague and shut down the liberalization known as Prague Spring. The band was a gaggle of arty hippies who considered themselves outside politics. But in the mid-1970s the Plastics’ run-ins with an increasingly stifling Communist government spurred the Czech human-rights movement named after its petition and manifesto, Charter 77, which was a direct response to the trial and imprisonment of musicians. From a decade of resistance by Charter 77 came the bloodless Velvet Revolution that ended Communist rule in Czechoslovakia.

The Plastics’ dark, low-fi music is far better known to human-rights groups than to rock fans. It has appealed to downtown New York musicians with its angularity and intransigence, and the critic Ritchie Unterberger gave the band a chapter in his 1998 book, “Unknown Legends of Rock ’n’ Roll: Psychedelic Unknowns, Mad Geniuses, Punk Pioneers, Lo-Fi Mavericks & More.” A Czech label, Globus, has reissued the complete Plastic People catalog on CD, and most of the albums are available at tamizdat.org .

“They’re the kind of band that people who follow the history of underground music know about them or reference them, but almost nobody has actually heard them,” said Jimmy Johnson, chief executive of the mail-order company Forced Exposure, which carries many little-known bands and used to stock the Plastics. “We could sell hundreds of copies of their first album, if we could get it.”

Mr. Stoppard, 70, is Czech, but his family emigrated in 1939 and did not return. In an interview at the Bernard J. Jacobs Theater, where the play opened last Sunday, he said he had been aware of the Plastics as a human-rights case since the ’70s but discovered their music only when he began writing “Rock ’n’ Roll.” He also discovered articulate, contentious writings by the Plastics’ manager and strategist, Ivan Jirous, and by the playwright Vaclav Havel, a founder of Charter 77, who became president of Czechoslovakia in 1989. (The Plastics’ album “Leading Horses” was recorded in 1981 at Mr. Havel’s farm, after the farmhouse where the music was first performed was burned down by the Czech secret police.)

Characters in “Rock ’n’ Roll” recount actual events and take up longtime arguments — sometimes in the words of people who made them at the time — as they grapple with questions about ideology and pragmatism, politics and counterculture, materialism and spirit, language and lies, art and economics. As the play moves toward the present, one character proclaims, “‘Make love not war’ was more important than ‘Workers of the world, unite!’” And while the play shows the countercultural triumph of music, Mr. Stoppard said political change isn’t that simple. “Make love, not war: That’s another utopian idea,” he said. “And you can imagine it working very well in a utopia, whether it’s a desert island or a plot of land in the wilds of the Appalachians where 300 people are making love, not war. It might work that way. But it doesn’t seem to be a serious operating factor in the way the world goes.”

Like Mr. Stoppard’s other plays “Rock ’n’ Roll” is full of pairings and balances: parallel characters, contrasted events, dialectics. It takes place in capitalist England and in Communist Czechoslovakia, and it revolves around Max, a die-hard Marxist professor enjoying academic freedom at Cambridge University, and Jan, a Czech student he briefly mentors. Jan’s strongest passion is for the psychedelic LPs he brings back to Prague; his fervor for the Plastics derails his life.

Another thread in “Rock ’n’ Roll” involves Syd Barrett, who led Pink Floyd until the damage from drugs and mental illness left him a recluse in Cambridge; the play makes him one of Max’s neighbors. Rock songs blare between scenes while their discographical information is projected on a video screen, and the play’s finale takes place at the first concert by the Rolling Stones in Prague.

The Plastics themselves begin and end the current Czech production of “Rock ’n’ Roll” at the National Theater in Prague, performing live.

Ivan Bierhanzl, who has worked with the Plastics intermittently since 1979 and is now the band’s manager and plays upright bass, said the Plastics were the first rock band to perform at the National Theater, which is more likely to present opera or Shakespeare. Once, the government would not permit the Plastics to perform in public at all, much less at the capital’s highbrow showplace.

The Plastics started as fans, and mimickers, of iconoclastic American bands including the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention and the Fugs. Like other late-1960s rockers worldwide, they turned shows into happenings, collaborating with visual artists; the Plastics performed in wild makeup, wearing robes made of bedsheets. “We were just a band of freaks, playing rock and roll,” Mr. Bierhanzl said by telephone from Prague before one of the Plastics’ National Theater performances. “It was the problem of the Communist government and the party that they didn’t like us. They didn’t like our aesthetics because it was something from the West — longhairs, capitalism.”

Around the same time that the Plastics were confounding their authoritarian government, another psychedelic movement — tropicalism in Brazil — was doing something similar, with sunny, gleefully scrambled postmodern pop that made Brazil’s dictatorship suspicious. Two ringleaders of tropicalism, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, were first jailed and then ordered into exile — going to England, where they ending up learning additional ways to internationalize their music. (Mr. Gil is now Brazil’s minister of culture.) But for years Communist Czechoslovakia kept most of its rock underground inside the country.

The government revoked the Plastics’ credentials as professional musicians in 1970, taking away access to both equipment and official gigs. As they would for nearly two decades, the Plastics persisted, under conditions that make punk-rock look like a luxury cruise. “We were workers,” Mr. Bierhanzl said. “For us it was important just to play and listen to our music, and absolutely not to be some heroes.”

Led by the composer Milan Hlavsa, who died in 2001, the Plastics turned from imitating American songs to writing their own. They built homemade amplifiers from scrounged transistor-radio parts, and they rehearsed, quietly, in living rooms, perfecting the material they might find a chance to perform at semiprivate concerts once or twice a year. Paraphrasing some ideas from Mr. Jirous, Mr. Stoppard said that the Plastic People “had an advantage in a certain sense over bands in the West, because they never had to face the temptation.”

“There was never the possibility of a desire for recognition being gratified,” he said. “So it was never on the table as something which might, as it were, change the way you play and the songs you choose.”

The Plastics’ songs never sounded like party music. Along with the drone of the Velvet Underground, they picked up the dissonances of Eastern European music, added the counterpoint of instruments like bass clarinet and viola, and tossed in flurries of free-jazz saxophone. The vocals cackled and growled in Czech, singing gallows-humored modern poetry. The authorities called the music morbid and weren’t necessarily wrong. The Plastics defied ever-optimistic official pronouncements simply through their bilious, discontented tone.

The Plastics’ most celebrated album, “Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned,” had lyrics by the poet and provocateur Egon Bondy, like those in “No One”: “No one/Nowhere/Never/Ever/Got anywhere/Who me?/Such a fool/I am not.” The songs were recorded in 1974; tapes were smuggled out of Czechoslovakia and released as an LP four years later in France, and copies slipped into Czechoslovakia. Nowadays, as music easily whizzes around the world via the Internet, “Rock ’n’ Roll” — with scenes of Jan and his fragile, irreplaceable collection of Western LPs — recalls how precious vinyl once was.

Plastics concerts were rare, clandestine events organized with sly humor. After the band’s credentials were revoked, it managed to perform at first under the auspices of its manager, Mr. Jirous, an art historian. He would rent a hall for a lecture-demonstration on Andy Warhol and Pop Art; then, after a brief presentation, the Plastics would “demonstrate” a full-length concert set of Velvet Underground songs. Under Czech law couples getting married could book their own wedding entertainment, so some Plastics friends and fans took their vows and held concerts of the “second culture”: one separate from both officially sanctioned art and the explicit opposition.

The Plastics didn’t set out to challenge the regime, but to ignore it. “Everybody else just collaborated a little bit with the regime because of work, of money, of studying and jobs and so on,” Mr. Bierhanzl said. “So everybody was a little bit in touch with the government but our crazy band. We were different.”

They were not ignored in return; crackdowns grew increasingly severe. The government’s attitude, Mr. Stoppard said, was, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.”

In 1974 the Plastics arranged one of their underground concerts in the village of Ceske Budejovice, but the government found out about it. Before it began, fans were shunted into a tunnel and ambushed by club-wielding policemen. All were photographed for police files, and some students were expelled, ending their academic careers.

At first the government took the Plastics more seriously than the opposition did. As “Rock ’n’ Roll” recounts, there was little respect, on either side, between the politicos and the freaks. “The rock ’n’ roll band didn’t think much of the intellectual dissenters, and the intellectuals didn’t think much of these dropouts,” Mr. Stoppard said. “The idea was that dropping out was not in fact an adequate response: opting out, ‘Leave me alone.’ Everybody had a perfect right to do it, but it wasn’t opposition.”

The government took care of that. In 1976, after the Plastics and friends staged another festival of the second culture, 27 people were arrested.

Vratislav Brabenec, the Plastics’ saxophonist and sometime lyricist, and Mr. Jirous were convicted of “organized disturbance of the peace” and imprisoned. “They made a big mistake with this trial,” Mr. Bierhanzl said. “Without it, maybe nobody would be interested about this band, but the trial was big P.R. for us.” At the trial dissidents and dropouts found common ground and forged their alliance.

But it would be more than a decade before they prevailed. In the meantime conditions grew worse. Band members were repeatedly interrogated by the police and sometimes beaten. The Plastics stopped giving concerts after 1981, making music only in private. Mr. Brabenec emigrated to Toronto in 1982. Mr. Jirous spent years in jail. Mr. Hlavsa held the band together until 1988, and then split off his own band with some former Plastic People under a new name: Pulnoc (Midnight), which was allowed to perform in Czechoslovakia and the West. On the eve of the Velvet Revolution the Plastic People were gone. It was hard to tell if the government had finally worn them down or if — despite their conscious intentions — they had somehow served their historical purpose.

Topical protest music can rapidly turn into an artifact; the people involved are gone, the causes won or lost, the slogan grown irrelevant. By the 1990s reggae and hip-hop had outflanked rock as global protest music, although rockers like Bruce Springsteen still lead arena-size protest singalongs. Like much music written under authoritarian regimes, the Plastic People’s songs may well hold double-entendres and sidelong references that attentive local listeners could glean at the time. But their music is more a mood than a manifesto; its bitter, sardonic disquiet lingers.

Mr. Bierhanzl said the Plastics now were “living in contemporary time.” The band reunited in 1997 for the 20th anniversary of Charter 77 and has stayed together, with some new members, since the death of Mr. Hlavsa. It is making an album of new material for its own 40th anniversary and releasing an archival DVD.

But it is still exorcising memories by performing at the National Theater. Back in 1977, as the Charter 77 movement was gaining international attention, the Communist government summoned artists to that theater and pressured them to sign a denunciation of the human rights movement. Many were sympathetic to Charter 77’s goals and close to its members, but they had families to support and jobs to protect; they signed. “For us,” Mr. Bierhanzl said, “it’s some kind of satisfaction that now we can play in the same hall.” He chuckled. “But it’s history.”

The Coup at Home

2007-11-11T13:36:00.000-08:00

By FRANK RICH
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
November 11, 2007

AS Gen. Pervez Musharraf arrested judges, lawyers and human-rights activists in Pakistan last week, our Senate was busy demonstrating its own civic mettle. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, liberal Democrats from America’s two most highly populated blue states, gave the thumbs up to Michael B. Mukasey, ensuring his confirmation as attorney general.

So what if America’s chief law enforcement official won’t say that waterboarding is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency. You’re either willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb, or you’re with the terrorists. Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf’s crackdown in Islamabad.

In the days since, the coup in Pakistan has been almost universally condemned as the climactic death knell for Bush foreign policy, the epitome of White House hypocrisy and incompetence. But that’s not exactly news. It’s been apparent for years that America was suicidal to go to war in Iraq, a country with no tie to 9/11 and no weapons of mass destruction, while showering billions of dollars on Pakistan, where terrorists and nuclear weapons proliferate under the protection of a con man who serves as a host to Osama bin Laden.

General Musharraf has always played our president for a fool and still does, with the vague promise of an election that he tossed the White House on Thursday. As if for sport, he has repeatedly mocked both Mr. Bush’s “freedom agenda” and his post-9/11 doctrine that any country harboring terrorists will be “regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”

A memorable highlight of our special relationship with this prized “ally” came in September 2006, when the general turned up in Washington to kick off his book tour. Asked about the book by a reporter at a White House press conference, he said he was contractually “honor bound” to remain mum until it hit the stores — thus demonstrating that Simon & Schuster had more clout with him than the president. This didn’t stop Mr. Bush from praising General Musharraf for his recently negotiated “truce” to prevent further Taliban inroads in northwestern Pakistan. When the Pakistani strongman “looks me in the eye” and says “there won’t be a Taliban and won’t be Al Qaeda,” the president said, “I believe him.”

Sooner than you could say “Putin,” The Daily Telegraph of London reported that Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, had signed off on this “truce.” Since then, the Pakistan frontier has become a more thriving terrorist haven than ever.

Now The Los Angeles Times reports that much of America’s $10 billion-plus in aid to Pakistan has gone to buy conventional weaponry more suitable for striking India than capturing terrorists. To rub it in last week, General Musharraf released 25 pro-Taliban fighters in a prisoner exchange with a tribal commander the day after he suspended the constitution.

But there’s another moral to draw from the Musharraf story, and it has to do with domestic policy, not foreign. The Pakistan mess, as The New York Times editorial page aptly named it, is not just another blot on our image abroad and another instance of our mismanagement of the war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It also casts a harsh light on the mess we have at home in America, a stain that will not be so easily eradicated.

In the six years of compromising our principles since 9/11, our democracy has so steadily been defined down that it now can resemble the supposedly aspiring democracies we’ve propped up in places like Islamabad. Time has taken its toll. We’ve become inured to democracy-lite. That’s why a Mukasey can be elevated to power with bipartisan support and we barely shrug.

This is a signal difference from the Vietnam era, and not necessarily for the better. During that unpopular war, disaffected Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American governmental institutions. The Bush years have brought an even more effective assault on those institutions from within. While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a quiet coup, ultimately more insidious than a blatant putsch like General Musharraf’s.

More Machiavellian still, Mr. Bush has constantly told the world he’s championing democracy even as he strangles it. Mr. Bush repeated the word “freedom” 27 times in roughly 20 minutes at his 2005 inauguration, and even presided over a “Celebration of Freedom” concert on the Ellipse hosted by Ryan Seacrest. It was an Orwellian exercise in branding, nothing more. The sole point was to give cover to our habitual practice of cozying up to despots (especially those who control the oil spigots) and to our own government’s embrace of warrantless wiretapping and torture, among other policies that invert our values.

Even if Mr. Bush had the guts to condemn General Musharraf, there is no longer any moral high ground left for him to stand on. Quite the contrary. Rather than set a democratic example, our president has instead served as a model of unconstitutional behavior, eagerly emulated by his Pakistani acolyte.

Take the Musharraf assault on human-rights lawyers. Our president would not be so unsubtle as to jail them en masse. But earlier this year a senior Pentagon official, since departed, threatened America’s major white-shoe law firms by implying that corporate clients should fire any firm whose partners volunteer to defend detainees in Guantánamo and elsewhere. For its part, Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department did not round up independent-minded United States attorneys and toss them in prison. It merely purged them without cause to serve Karl Rove’s political agenda.

Tipping his hat in appreciation of Mr. Bush’s example, General Musharraf justified his dismantling of Pakistan’s Supreme Court with language mimicking the president’s diatribes against activist judges. The Pakistani leader further echoed Mr. Bush by expressing a kinship with Abraham Lincoln, citing Lincoln’s Civil War suspension of a prisoner’s fundamental legal right to a hearing in court, habeas corpus, as a precedent for his own excesses. (That’s like praising F.D.R. for setting up internment camps.) Actually, the Bush administration has outdone both Lincoln and Musharraf on this score: Last January, Mr. Gonzales testified before Congress that “there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution.”

To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal.

This is most apparent in the Republican presidential race, where most of the candidates seem to be running for dictator and make no apologies for it. They’re falling over each other to expand Gitmo, see who can promise the most torture and abridge the largest number of constitutional rights. The front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, boasts a proven record in extralegal executive power grabs, Musharraf-style: After 9/11 he tried to mount a coup, floating the idea that he stay on as mayor in defiance of New York’s term-limits law.

What makes the Democrats’ Mukasey cave-in so depressing is that it shows how far even exemplary sticklers for the law like Senators Feinstein and Schumer have lowered democracy’s bar. When they argued that Mr. Mukasey should be confirmed because he’s not as horrifying as Mr. Gonzales or as the acting attorney general who might get the job otherwise, they sounded whipped. After all these years of Bush-Cheney torture, they’ll say things they know are false just to move on.

In a Times OpEd article justifying his reluctant vote to confirm a man Dick Cheney promised would make “an outstanding attorney general,” Mr. Schumer observed that waterboarding is already “illegal under current laws and conventions.” But then he vowed to support a new bill “explicitly” making waterboarding illegal because Mr. Mukasey pledged to enforce it. Whatever.

Even if Congress were to pass such legislation, Mr. Bush would veto it, and even if the veto were by some miracle overturned, Mr. Bush would void the law with a “signing statement.” That’s what he effectively did in 2005 when he signed a bill that its authors thought outlawed the torture of detainees.

That Mr. Schumer is willing to employ blatant Catch-22 illogic to pretend that Mr. Mukasey’s pledge on waterboarding has any force shows what pathetic crumbs the Democrats will settle for after all these years of being beaten down. The judges and lawyers challenging General Musharraf have more fight left in them than this.

Last weekend a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that the Democratic-controlled Congress and Mr. Bush are both roundly despised throughout the land, and that only 24 percent of Americans believe their country is on the right track. That’s almost as low as the United States’ rock-bottom approval ratings in the latest Pew surveys of Pakistan (15 percent) and Turkey (9 percent).

Wrong track is a euphemism. We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon.

2007-11-10T13:08:00.000-08:00

Norman Mailer, Outspoken Novelist, Dies at 84

2007-11-10T05:54:00.000-08:00

By CHARLES McGRATH
The New York Times
November 10, 2007

Norman Mailer, the combative, controversial and often outspoken novelist who loomed over American letters longer and larger than any writer of his generation, died today at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. He was 84.

The cause was renal failure , said J. Michael Lennon, his literary executor. Mr. Mailer burst on the scene in 1948 with “The Naked and the Dead,” a partly autobiographical novel about World War II, and for the next six decades he was rarely far from the center stage. He published more than 30 books, including novels, biographies and works of nonfiction, and twice won the Pulitzer Prize: for “The Armies of the Night” (1968), which also won the National Book Award, and “The Executioner’s Song” (1979).

He also wrote, directed, and acted in several low-budget movies, helped found The Village Voice and for many years was a regular guest on television talk shows, where he could reliably be counted on to make oracular pronouncements and deliver provocative opinions, sometimes coherently and sometimes not.

Mr. Mailer belonged to the old literary school that regarded novel writing as a heroic enterprise undertaken by heroic characters with egos to match. He was the most transparently ambitious writer of his era, seeing himself in competition not just with his contemporaries but with the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

He was also the least shy and risk-averse of writers. He eagerly sought public attention, and publicity inevitably followed him on the few occasions when he tried to avoid it. His big ears, barrel chest, striking blue eyes and helmet of seemingly electrified hair — jet black at first and ultimately snow white — made him instantly recognizable, a celebrity long before most authors were lured out into the limelight.

At different points in his life Mr. Mailer was a prodigious drinker and drug taker, a womanizer, a devoted family man, a would-be politician who ran for mayor of New York, a hipster existentialist, an antiwar protester, an opponent of women’s liberation and an all-purpose feuder and short-fused brawler, who with the slightest provocation would happily engage in head-butting, arm-wrestling and random punch-throwing. Boxing obsessed him and inspired some of his best writing. Any time he met a critic or a reviewer, even a friendly one, he would put up his fists and drop into a crouch.

Gore Vidal, with whom he frequently wrangled, once wrote: “Mailer is forever shouting at us that he is about to tell us something we must know or has just told us something revelatory and we failed to hear him or that he will, God grant his poor abused brain and body just one more chance, get through to us so that we will know. Each time he speaks he must become more bold, more loud, put on brighter motley and shake more foolish bells. Yet of all my contemporaries I retain the greatest affection for Norman as a force and as an artist. He is a man whose faults, though many, add to rather than subtract from the sum of his natural achievements.”

Mr. Mailer was a tireless worker who at his death was writing a sequel to his 2007 novel, “The Castle in the Forest.” If some of his books, written quickly and under financial pressure, were not as good as he had hoped, none of them were forgettable or without his distinctive stamp. And if he never quite succeeded in bringing off what he called “the big one” — the Great American Novel — it was not for want of trying.

Along the way, he transformed American journalism by introducing to nonfiction writing some of the techniques of the novelist and by placing at the center of his reporting a brilliant, flawed and larger-than-life character who was none other than Norman Mailer himself.

A Pampered Son

Norman Kingsley — or, in Hebrew, Nachem Malek — Mailer was born in Long Branch, N.J., on Jan. 31, 1923. His father, Isaac Barnett, known as Barney, was a South African émigré, a snappy dresser — he sometimes wore spats and carried a walking stick — and a largely ineffectual businessman.

The dominant figure in the family was Mr. Mailer’s mother, Fanny Schneider, who came from a vibrant clan in Long Branch, where her father ran a grocery store and was the town’s unofficial rabbi. Though another child, Barbara, was born in 1927, Norman remained his mother’s favorite; she declared him “perfect” — a judgment from which she never deviated, no matter how her son behaved in later life.

When Norman was 9, the family moved to Crown Heights, in Brooklyn. Pampered and doted on, he excelled at both P.S. 161 and Boys High School, from which he graduated in 1939. The next fall he enrolled as a 16-year-old freshman at Harvard, where he showed up wearing a newly purchased outfit of gold-brown jacket, green-and-blue striped pants, and white saddle shoes. Classmates remembered him as brash and jug-eared and full of big talk about his sexual experience. (In fact he had had very little, a lack he quickly set about rectifying.)

Mr. Mailer intended to major in aeronautical engineering, but by the time he was a sophomore, he had fallen in love with literature. He spent the summer reading and rereading James T. Farrell’s “Studs Lonigan,” John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” and John Dos Passos’s “U.S.A.,” and he began, or so he claimed, to set himself a daily quota of 3,000 words of his own, on the theory that this was the way to get bad writing out of his system. By 1941 he was sufficiently purged to win the Story magazine prize for best short story written by an undergraduate.

Mr. Mailer graduated from Harvard in 1943 determined on a literary career. He began work on a thousand-page novel about a mental hospital (never published) while waiting to be drafted. He was finally called up by the Army in the spring of 1944, after marrying Bea Silverman, in January, and was sent to the Philippines.

Mr. Mailer saw little combat in the war and finished his military career as a cook in occupied Japan. But his wartime experience, and in particular a single patrol he made on the island of Leyte, became the raw material for “The Naked and the Dead,” the book that put him on the map.

Mr. Mailer wrote “The Naked and the Dead,” which is about a 13-man platoon fighting the Japanese on a Pacific atoll, in 15 months or so, and when it was published, in the spring of 1948, it was almost universally praised — the last time this would ever happen to him. Some critics ranked it among the best war novels ever written.

“The Naked and the Dead” sold 200,000 copies in just three months — a huge number in those days — and remains Mr. Mailer’s greatest literary and commercial success, even though it is in part an apprentice work, owing a large and transparent debt to Dos Passos, Tolstoy and James T. Farrell.

Mr. Mailer later said of it: “Part of me thought it was possibly the greatest book written since ‘War and Peace.’ On the other hand I also thought, ‘I don’t know anything about writing. I’m virtually an impostor.’ ”

‘Daring the Unknown’

His second book, “Barbary Shore” (1951), a political novel about, among other things, the struggle between capitalism and socialism, earned what Mr. Mailer called “possibly the worst reviews of any serious novel in recent years.” A third, “The Deer Park” (1955), in part a fictionalized account of Elia Kazan’s troubles with the House Un-American Activities Committee, fared a little better but not much, and for the rest of the decade Mr. Mailer wrote no fiction at all.

For much of the ’50s he drifted, frequently drunk or stoned or both, and affected odd accents: British, Irish, gangster, Texan. In 1955, together with two friends, Daniel Wolf and Edwin Fancher, he founded The Village Voice, and while writing a column for that paper he began to evolve what became his trademark style — bold, poetic, metaphysical, even shamanistic at times — and his personal philosophy of hipsterism. It was a homespun, Greenwich Village version of existentialism, which argued that the truly with-it, blacks and jazz musicians especially, led more authentic lives and enjoyed better orgasms.

The most famous, or infamous, version of this philosophy was Mr. Mailer’s controversial 1957 essay “The White Negro,” which seemed to endorse violence as an existential act and declared the murder of a white candy-store owner by two 18-year-old blacks an example of “daring the unknown.”

In November 1960, Mr. Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a penknife, seriously wounding her. The incident happened at the end of an all-night party announcing Mr. Mailer’s intention to run in the 1961 mayoral campaign, and he, like many of his guests, had been drinking heavily. Mr. Mailer was arrested, but his wife declined to press charges, and he was eventually released after being sent to Bellevue Hospital for observation. The marriage broke up two years later.

All told, Mr. Mailer was married six times, counting a quickie with Carol Stevens, whom he married and divorced within a couple of days in 1980 to grant legitimacy to their daughter, Maggie. His other wives, in addition to Ms. Silverman and Ms. Morales, were Lady Jeanne Campbell, granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook; Beverly Rentz Bentley; and Norris Church, with whom he was living at his death. Lady Campbell died in June.In the 1970s Mr. Mailer entered into a long feud with feminists and proponents of women’s liberation, and in a famous 1971 debate with Germaine Greer at Town Hall in Manhattan he declared himself an “enemy of birth control.” He meant it. By his various wives, Mr. Mailer had nine children, all of whom survive him: Susan, , by Ms. Silverman; Danielle and Elizabeth Anne, by Ms. Morales; Kate, by Lady Campbell; Michael Burks and Stephen McLeod, by Ms. Bentley; Maggie Alexandra, by Ms. Stevens; and John Buffalo, by Ms. Church. Also surviving are an adopted son, Matthew, by an earlier marriage of Ms. Norris’s, and 10 grandchildren.

For all his hipsterism, Mr. Mailer was an old-fashioned, attentive father. Starting in the 1960s, the financial burden of feeding and clothing his offspring, as well as keeping up with his numerous alimony payments, caused him to churn out a couple of novels, including “An American Dream” (1965), for the sake of a quick payday and also to take on freelance magazine assignments.

A series of articles for Esquire on the 1968 Democratic and Republican conventions were the basis for his book “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” and some articles for Harper’s and Commentary about the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon became the basis for the prizewinning book “The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History.”

‘Servant to a Wild Man’

The beginning of “Armies” is both a good summary of Mr. Mailer’s life to that point and an example of how he had begun to turn himself into a character in which literary style and selfhood were virtually indistinguishable:

“As Mailer had come to recognize over the years, the modest everyday fellow of his daily round was servant to a wild man in himself: The gent did not appear so very often, sometimes so rarely as once a month, sometimes not even twice a year, and he sometimes came when Mailer was frightened and furious at the fear, sometimes he came just to get a breath of fresh air. He was indispensable, however, and Mailer was even fond of him, for the wild man was witty in his own wild way and absolutely fearless. He would have been admirable, except that he was an absolute egomaniac, a Beast —no recognition existed of the existence of anything beyond the range of his reach.”

The critic Richard Gilman said of the book: “In ‘Armies of the Night,’ the rough force of Mailer’s imagination, his brilliant wayward gifts of observation, his ravishing if often calculated honesty and his chutzpah all flourish on the steady ground of a newly coherent subject and theme.” Alfred Kazin praised the book for its “admirable sensibilities, candid intelligence” and “most moving concern for American itself.”

Somehow in this busy decade Mr. Mailer also managed to write “Of a Fire on the Moon,” about the 1969 lunar landing, which began as a series for Life magazine; to make his most famous movie, “Maidstone,” during the filming of which he bit off part of an ear of the actor Rip Torn after Mr. Torn attacked him with a hammer; and to run finally for mayor of New York, this time as a secessionist candidate, campaigning to make New York City the 51st state. He also proposed to ban private automobiles from the city.

The writer Jimmy Breslin, who was also on the ticket, thought the race was a lark until, at a disastrous rally at the Village Gate nightclub, he discovered that Mr. Mailer was serious. Mr. Breslin later recalled, “I found out I was running with Ezra Pound.” (The Mailer team eventually lost in the Democratic primary to Mario Procaccino, who was beaten in the election by John V. Lindsay.)

In an interviewin September 2006, Mr. Mailer said his favorite novel, if not his best, was “Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” a mystery thriller he wrote, under extreme financial pressure, in just two months in 1984. He was in tax trouble, he explained, and needed to crank something out quickly. “I was prepared to write a bad book if necessary,” he said, “but instead the style came out, and that saved it for me.”

His best book, he decided after thinking for a moment, was “Ancient Evenings” (1983), a long novel about ancient Egypt that received what had by then become familiar critical treatment: extravagantly praised in some quarters, disdained in others. About the book that many critics consider his masterpiece, “The Executioner’s Song,” he said he had mixed feelings because it wasn’t entirely his project.

“The Executioner’s Song,” which is about Gary Gilmore, a convicted murderer who, after a stay on death row, asked to be executed by the state of Utah in 1976, was the idea of Lawrence Schiller, a writer and filmmaker who did much of the reporting for the book, taping Mr. Gilmore and his family.

But in “The Executioner’s Song,” Mr. Mailer recast this material in what was for him a new impersonal voice that rendered the thoughts of his characters in a style partly drawn for their own way of talking. He called it a “true-life novel.”

Joan Didion, reviewing the book for The New York Times Book Review, said: “It is ambitious to the point of vertigo. It is a largely unremarked fact about Mailer that he is a great and obsessed stylist, a writer to whom the shape of the sentence is the story. His sentences do not get long or short by accident, or because he is in a hurry. I think no one but Mailer could have dared this book. The authentic Western voice, the voice heard in ‘The Executioner’s Song,’ is one heard often in life but only rarely in literature.”

Mr. Schiller also assisted Mr. Mailer with “Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery,” his 1995 book about Lee Harvey Oswald, President John F. Kennedy’s assassin. In a review for The Sunday Times of London, Martin Amis called the book a “remarkable feat of imaginative sympathy.” But Mr. Amis but also noted that it recalled Mr. Mailer’s championing of the convict Jack Henry Abbott, which displayed, he said, the author’s “old weakness for any killer who has puzzled his way through a few pages of Marx.”

Mr. Abbott was serving a long sentence in a Utah prison for forgery and for killing a fellow inmate when, in 1977, he began writing to Mr. Mailer. Mr. Mailer saw literary talent in Mr. Abbott’s letters and helped him publish them in an acclaimed volume called “In the Belly of the Beast.” He also lobbied to get Mr. Abbott paroled. A few weeks after being released, in June 1981, Mr. Abbott, now a darling in leftist literary circles, stabbed to death a waiter in a Lower East Side restaurant, and his champion became a target of national outrage.

Black-Tie Benefits

The episode was the last great controversy of Mr. Mailer’s career. Chastened perhaps, and stabilized by what would prove to be a marriage with Ms. Church, a former model whom he wed in November 1980, Mr. Mailer mellowed and even turned sedate. The former hostess-baiter and scourge of parties became a regular guest at black-tie benefits and dinners given by the likes of William S. Paley, Gloria Vanderbilt and Oscar de la Renta. His editor, Jason Epstein, said of this period, “There are two sides to Norman Mailer, and the good side has won.”

In 1984 Mr. Mailer was elected president of PEN American Center, the writers’ organization, and was the main force in bringing together writers from all over the world for a much publicized literary conference called “The Writer’s Imagination and the Imagination of the State.” For a change, Mr. Mailer even found himself attacked from the left as many of the attendees protested about his inviting George P. Schultz, then secretary of state, to address the opening session. Mr. Mailer dismissed them as “puritanical leftists.”

In the ’90s Mr. Mailer’s health began to fail. He had arthritis and angina and was fitted with two hearing aids. But his productivity was undiminished, especially after he embarked on what he called a “monastic regime” in 1995, swearing off drinking when he was working.

“Bellow and myself and a couple of others were very much smaller than Faulkner and Hemingway,” he conceded early in the decade, but he never backed off from the claim that among his contemporaries he was the heavyweight champion.

In 1991 he published “Harlot’s Ghost,” a 1,310-page novel about the Central Intelligence Agency, in which he conceived of it as a kind of cold-war church, the keeper of the nation’s secrets and the bearer of its values. A poorly received biography of Picasso came out in 1995, followed in 1997 by “The Gospel According to the Son,” a first-person novel about Jesus. It gave some critics the opportunity they had been waiting for. Norman Mailer thinks he’s God, they said.

Mr. Mailer’s next novel, “The Castle in the Forest,” which came out a decade later, was about Hitler, but the narrator was a devil, a persona he admitted he found particularly congenial. “It’s as close as a writer gets to unrequited joy,” he said. “We are devils when all is said and done.”

Interviewed at his house in Provincetown, Mass., shortly before that book’s publication, Mr. Mailer, frail but cheerful, said he hoped his failing eyesight would hold out long enough for him to complete a sequel. His knees were shot, he added, holding up the two canes he walked with, and he had begun doing daily crossword puzzles to refresh his word hoard.

On the other hand, he said, writing was now easier for him in at least one respect. “The waste is less,” he said. “The elements of mania and depression are diminished. Writing is a serious and sober activity for me now compared to when I was younger. The question of how good are you is one that really good novelists obsess about more than poor ones. Good novelists are always terribly affected by the fear that they’re not as good as they thought and why are they doing it, what are they up to?

“It’s such an odd notion, particularly in this technological society, of whether your life is justified by being a novelist. And the nice thing about getting older is that I no longer worry about that. I’ve come to the simple recognition that would have saved me much woe 30 or 40 or 50 years ago — that one’s eventual reputation has very little to do with one’s talent. History determines it, not the order of your words.”

Shaking his head, he added: “In two years I will have been a published novelist for 60 years. That’s not true for very many of us.” And he recalled something he had said at the National Book Award ceremony in 2005, when he was given a lifetime achievement award: that he felt like an old coachmaker who looks with horror at the turn of the 20th century, watching automobiles roar by with their fumes.

“I think the novel is on the way out,” he said. “I also believe, because it’s natural to take one’s own occupation more seriously than others, that the world may be the less for that.”

Norman Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007)

R.I.P.

###

Scratchpad: Fri. 9 Nov. 2007

2007-11-09T17:53:00.000-08:00

Since the USA went off the Gold Standard what holds up the $US?

Confidence in the Government of the United States!

(So much for reactionaries like Ron Paul who want to “go back” to gold which is tantamount to going back in time to the good old bad old stupid old days. But I’m sure according to his John Birch Society, StormFront and ignorant libertarian homunculi devotees, he’s got something there.)

One good thing about “weak dollar policy” of the twice-illegitimately installed Bush Regime (which if the Dems and Republicans of conscience had the guts they’d impeach, remove and jail!) is: it makes exports cheaper, thus Bush’s fellow criminal corporate crapitalist cronies are happy.

At the same time, the fascistic privileged Powers That Be can get their jollies by watching workers, senior citizens, veterans, the ranks of the military, poor people etc. scramble for the few remaining crumbs of social wealth most of which is caught in a perpetual flowing stream of accelerating redistribution upward into the coffers of the You Know Who.

Furthermore, it makes emigration extremely difficult to next to impossible for most Americans who drank the Kool Aid and ate the cole slaw, buying into the petit bourgeois nightmare of everything that slaughters the human soul.

“See! Nobody wants to leave AmeriKKKa. The stupid little oinkers out there in Television Land would much rather stay in this ‘Our Gray-ut Lay-und’ laboring beneath the hellish heel of the Prostitute Ethic and the Spirit of Exploitation and Wage-and-Debt Slavery!”

In the longer term everybody suffers as a weak dollar leads to spiraling inflation and recession. “You remember the days of $200 loaves of bread, don’t you…Mein Herr…?”

The Dollar and the Country and the Future ain’t what they used to be.

Thank ya, George Dumbya…! “You think I‘m dumb, America? Eh-heh eh-heh eh-heh…” (Smart enough to play it dumb…as he always has…since suckling at the Evil Anti-Mother’s moldy old shriveled old teat.)

[Thx in part to NPR.]

----

====

Waterboarding Drew Critics During U.S.-Philippine War

2007-11-09T08:33:00.000-08:00

The “water cure,” as it was then known, was widely used in the 12-year war in the Philippines that began in 1898, says historian William Loren Katz. William Howard Taft, then the U.S. governor of the islands, made the technique front-page news when he told Congress it had been used to extract information in the conflict. Meanwhile, a soldier’s letter boasting of giving 160 people the “water cure,” of whom only 26 survived, was made public. [ More ]

====

90th Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution

2007-11-07T10:51:00.000-08:00

* Special Note: To I.M. Small.

2007-11-07T09:07:00.000-08:00

The Blogger server is glitchy again and after several tries I could not post your message (poem). It’s not the first time I’ve been confronted with this problem around here. So if you’re of a mind, please submit your message again for publication later today or tomorrow and I’ll give it another try. That’s all I can do at this time.

Thx.

Regards

GP

====

The presidency is now a criminal conspiracy

2007-11-06T13:03:00.000-08:00

Olbermann: Bush may not observe the rules, but the country abides by them

SPECIAL COMMENT

By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
updated 9:42 p.m. ET, Mon., Nov. 5, 2007

It is a fact startling in its cynical simplicity and it requires cynical and simple words to be properly expressed: The presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.

All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare stupidity; all the invocations of World War III, all the sophistic questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop, all the phony secrets; all the claims of executive privilege, all the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence of his apologists...

All of it is now, after one revelation last week, transparently clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of the government, the refocusing of our entire nation, toward keeping this mock president and this unstable vice president and this departed wildly self-overrating attorney general, and the others, from potential prosecution for having approved or ordered the illegal torture of prisoners being held in the name of this country.

"Waterboarding is torture," Daniel Levin was to write. Daniel Levin was no theorist and no protester. He was no troublemaking politician. He was no table-pounding commentator. Daniel Levin was an astonishingly patriotic American and a brave man.

Brave not just with words or with stances, even in a dark time when that kind of bravery can usually be scared or bought off.

Charged, as you heard in the story from ABC News last Friday, with assessing the relative legality of the various nightmares in the Pandora's box that is the Orwell-worthy euphemism "Enhanced Interrogation," Mr. Levin decided that the simplest, and the most honest, way to evaluate them ... was to have them enacted upon himself.

Daniel Levin took himself to a military base and let himself be waterboarded.

Mr. Bush, ever done anything that personally courageous?

Perhaps when you've gone to Walter Reed and teared up over the maimed servicemen? And then gone back to the White House and determined that there would be more maimed servicemen?

Has it been that kind of personal courage, Mr. Bush, when you've spoken of American victims and the triumph of freedom and the sacrifice of your own popularity for the sake of our safety? And then permitted others to fire or discredit or destroy anybody who disagreed with you, whether they were your own generals, or Max Cleland, or Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, or Daniel Levin?

Daniel Levin should have a statue in his honor in Washington right now.

Instead, he was forced out as acting assistant attorney general nearly three years ago because he had the guts to do what George Bush couldn't do in a million years: actually put himself at risk for the sake of his country, for the sake of what is right.

And they waterboarded him. And he wrote that even though he knew those doing it meant him no harm, and he knew they would rescue him at the instant of the slightest distress, and he knew he would not die — still, with all that reassurance, he could not stop the terror screaming from inside of him, could not quell the horror, could not convince that which is at the core of each of us, the entity who exists behind all the embellishments we strap to ourselves, like purpose and name and family and love, he could not convince his being that he wasn't drowning.

Waterboarding, he said, is torture. Legally, it is torture! Practically, it is torture! Ethically, it is torture! And he wrote it down.

Wrote it down somewhere, where it could be contrasted with the words of this country's 43rd president: "The United States of America ... does not torture."

Made you into a liar, Mr. Bush.

Made you into, if anybody had the guts to pursue it, a criminal, Mr. Bush.

Waterboarding had already been used on Khalid Sheik Mohammed and a couple of other men none of us really care about except for the one detail you'd forgotten — that there are rules. And even if we just make up these rules, this country observes them anyway, because we're Americans and we're better than that.

We're better than you.

And the man your Justice Department selected to decide whether or not waterboarding was torture had decided, and not in some phony academic fashion, nor while wearing the Walter Mitty poseur attire of flight suit and helmet.

He had put his money, Mr. Bush, where your mouth was.

So, your sleazy sycophantic henchman Mr. Gonzales had him append an asterisk suggesting his black-and-white answer wasn't black-and-white, that there might have been a quasi-legal way of torturing people, maybe with an absolute time limit and a physician entitled to stop it, maybe, if your administration had ever bothered to set any rules or any guidelines.

And then when your people realized that even that was too dangerous, Daniel Levin was branded "too independent" and "someone who could (not) be counted on."

In other words, Mr. Bush, somebody you couldn't count on to lie for you.

So, Levin was fired.

Because if it ever got out what he'd concluded, and the lengths to which he went to validate that conclusion, anybody who had sanctioned waterboarding and who-knows-what-else on anybody, you yourself, you would have been screwed.

And screwed you are.

It can't be coincidence that the story of Daniel Levin should emerge from the black hole of this secret society of a presidency just at the conclusion of the unhappy saga of the newest attorney general nominee.

Another patriot somewhere listened as Judge Mukasey mumbled like he'd never heard of waterboarding and refused to answer in words … that which Daniel Levin answered on a waterboard somewhere in Maryland or Virginia three years ago.

And this someone also heard George Bush say, "The United States of America does not torture," and realized either he was lying or this wasn't the United States of America anymore, and either way, he needed to do something about it.

Not in the way Levin needed to do something about it, but in a brave way nonetheless.

We have U.S. senators who need to do something about it, too.

Chairman Leahy of the Judiciary Committee has seen this for what it is and said "enough."

Sen. Schumer has seen it, reportedly, as some kind of puzzle piece in the New York political patronage system, and he has failed.

What Sen. Feinstein has seen, to justify joining Schumer in rubber-stamping Mukasey, I cannot guess.

It is obvious that both those senators should look to the meaning of the story of Daniel Levin and recant their support for Mukasey's confirmation.

And they should look into their own committee's history and recall that in 1973, their predecessors were able to wring even from Richard Nixon a guarantee of a special prosecutor (ultimately a special prosecutor of Richard Nixon!), in exchange for their approval of his new attorney general, Elliott Richardson.

If they could get that out of Nixon, before you confirm the president's latest human echo on Tuesday, you had better be able to get a "yes" or a "no" out of Michael Mukasey.

Ideally you should lock this government down financially until a special prosecutor is appointed, or 50 of them, but I'm not holding my breath. The "yes" or the "no" on waterboarding will have to suffice.

Because, remember, if you can't get it, or you won't with the time between tonight and the next presidential election likely to be the longest year of our lives, you are leaving this country, and all of us, to the waterboards, symbolic and otherwise, of George W. Bush.

Ultimately, Mr. Bush, the real question isn't who approved the waterboarding of this fiend Khalid Sheik Mohammed and two others.

It is: Why were they waterboarded?

Study after study for generation after generation has confirmed that torture gets people to talk, torture gets people to plead, torture gets people to break, but torture does not get them to tell the truth.

Of course, Mr. Bush, this isn't a problem if you don't care if the terrorist plots they tell you about are the truth or just something to stop the tormentors from drowning them.

If, say, a president simply needed a constant supply of terrorist threats to keep a country scared.

If, say, he needed phony plots to play hero during, and to boast about interrupting, and to use to distract people from the threat he didn't interrupt.

If, say, he realized that even terrorized people still need good ghost stories before they will let a president pillage the Constitution,

Well, Mr. Bush, who better to dream them up for you than an actual terrorist?

He'll tell you everything he ever fantasized doing in his most horrific of daydreams, his equivalent of the day you "flew" onto the deck of the Lincoln to explain you'd won in Iraq.

Now if that's what this is all about, you tortured not because you're so stupid you think torture produces confession but you tortured because you're smart enough to know it produces really authentic-sounding fiction — well, then, you're going to need all the lawyers you can find … because that crime wouldn't just mean impeachment, would it?

That crime would mean George W. Bush is going to prison.

Thus the master tumblers turn, and the lock yields, and the hidden explanations can all be perceived, in their exact proportions, in their exact progressions.

Daniel Levin's eminently practical, eminently logical, eminently patriotic way of testing the legality of waterboarding has to vanish, and him with it.

Thus Alberto Gonzales has to use that brain that sounds like an old car trying to start on a freezing morning to undo eight centuries of the forward march of law and government.

Thus Dick Cheney has to ridiculously assert that confirming we do or do not use any particular interrogation technique would somehow help the terrorists.

Thus Michael Mukasey, on the eve of the vote that will make him the high priest of the law of this land, cannot and must not answer a question, nor even hint that he has thought about a question, which merely concerns the theoretical definition of waterboarding as torture.

Because, Mr. Bush, in the seven years of your nightmare presidency, this whole string of events has been transformed.

From its beginning as the most neglectful protection ever of the lives and safety of the American people ... into the most efficient and cynical exploitation of tragedy for political gain in this country's history ... and, then, to the giddying prospect that you could do what the military fanatics did in Japan in the 1930s and remake a nation into a fascist state so efficient and so self-sustaining that the fascism would be nearly invisible.

But at last this frightful plan is ending with an unexpected crash, the shocking reality that no matter how thoroughly you might try to extinguish them, Mr. Bush, how thoroughly you tried to brand disagreement as disloyalty, Mr. Bush, there are still people like Daniel Levin who believe in the United States of America as true freedom, where we are better, not because of schemes and wars, but because of dreams and morals.

And ultimately these men, these patriots, will defeat you and they will return this country to its righteous standards, and to its rightful owners, the people.

Wobbled by Wealth?

2007-11-05T20:54:00.000-08:00

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
November 5, 2007

At just about every stop I’ve made so far on my book tour, what I’ve come to think of as The Question comes up. I talk about the origins of the long right-wing dominance of American politics, and the reasons I believe that dominance is coming to an end. Then someone asks, “How can you be optimistic about the prospects for progressive change, when big money has so much influence on politics?”

It’s a good question.

The public wants change. “If Americans have ever been angrier with the state of the country,” begins a new strategy memo from the polling organization Democracy Corps, “we have not witnessed it.”

Nor is the demand for change solely about Iraq: there has been a strong revival of economic populism. Democracy Corps asked those who believe America is on the wrong track to choose phrases that best described their views of what’s gone wrong. The most commonly chosen were “Big businesses get whatever they want in Washington” and “Leaders have forgotten the middle class.”

So much, by the way, for pundits who claim that Americans don’t care about economic inequality.

Longer-term studies of public opinion suggest a substantial leftward shift. James Stimson, a political scientist who uses data from many polls to construct an index of the overall liberalism or conservatism of the electorate, finds that America is now more liberal than it has been since the early 1960s. And the tactics the right has historically used to distract voters from economic issues, above all the exploitation of racial tensions, have been losing their effectiveness.

But the Democracy Corps memo warns that “Democrats have not yet found their voice as agents of change.” Indeed. What the memo doesn’t say, but is all too obvious, is that one big reason the Democrats are having trouble finding their voice is the influence of big money.

The most conspicuous example of this influence right now is the way Senate Democrats are dithering over whether to close the hedge fund tax loophole — which allows executives at private equity firms and hedge funds to pay a tax rate of only 15 percent on most of their income.

Only a handful of very wealthy people benefit from this loophole, while closing the loophole would yield billions of dollars each year in revenue. Retrieving this revenue is a key ingredient in legislation approved by the House Ways and Means Committee to reform the alternative minimum tax, something that must be done to avoid a de facto tax increase for millions of middle-class Americans.

A handful of superwealthy hedge fund managers versus millions of middle-class Americans — it sounds like a no-brainer.

But as The Financial Times reports, “Key votes have been delayed and time bought after the investment industry hired some of Washington’s most prominent lobbyists to influence lawmakers and spread largesse through campaign donations.” It goes on to describe how Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, was “toasted by industry lobbyists” (and serenaded by Barry Manilow) at a money-raising party for his special fund to help Democrats get elected next year.

Is this the shape of things to come? My questioners fear that it is.

Fears of betrayal are often focused on Hillary Clinton. Some people who raise The Question cite an article in The Nation from last summer, which suggested that Hillary Clinton’s commitment to change is suspect. “Not only is Hillary more reliant on large donations and corporate money than her Democratic rivals,” warned the article, “but advisers in her inner circle are closely affiliated with unionbusters, G.O.P. operatives, conservative media and other Democratic Party antagonists.”

O.K., some perspective. I sometimes hear people say that there’s no difference between Democrats and Republicans; that’s foolish. Look at the fight over children’s health insurance, and you can see how different the parties’ philosophies and priorities really are. All of the leading Democratic candidates are offering strongly progressive policy proposals; the Republicans are, if anything, running to the right of the Bush administration.

Also, even history’s greatest progressives had to make compromises to win their victories. F.D.R.’s New Deal depended on the support of Southern segregationists. Compared with that, Senator Clinton’s acceptance of lots of corporate donations doesn’t look so bad — though I’d be reassured if she made her views on tax reform clearer, and matched John Edwards’s focus on corporate reform.

Still, I am worried.

One of the saddest stories I tell in my book is that of Al Smith, the great reformist governor of New York, who gradually turned into a narrow-minded economic conservative and bitter critic of F.D.R. H. L. Mencken explained it thusly: “His association with the rich has apparently wobbled him and changed him. He has become a golf player.”

So, how wobbled are today’s Democrats? I guess we’ll find out.

From the ‘How Big Media Should Question the Candidates’ files

2007-11-05T17:24:00.001-08:00

Part I: Fred Thompson

Moderator: Mr. "Hollywood" Freddy Thompson is our guest.

Thompson: Nice to be here.

Moderator: That’s what you think.

Thompson: Uh-oh…

Moderator: You’ve had a very close long-term friendship with a convicted drug dealer and bookie who‘s been flying you around the country on his private jet.

Thompson: [interrupting] Now wait a minute…!

Moderator: You also got yourself a beautiful young trophy wife.

Thompson: It’s true love, I tell ya! It’s true love! Old fashioned values love, the kind that’ll see ya through, the kinda love that my Mammy and Daddy knew…!

Moderator: How did you do it, Mr. Thompson? How did you do it? By packing her nose full of blow? Answer the question!

Thompson: You’re just picking on me because I’m a White Confederate male politically dependent on a backward bumpkin constituency of inbred sheep-humping sheet-heads; and owe my acting career to Hollywooded New Yorker commie Jew mother-hugging writer’s union picket-line-walking godless degenerates who keep a show like Law and Order on the air long after it should have died a natural death !

Moderator: We appreciate the candor, Mr. Thompson, but you still haven’t answered the question.

Thompson: What question…?

Moderator: How did an old coot like yourself manage to get someone as attractive as Mrs. Thompson to marry them? Muff diving? Yes or No, Mr. Thompson…Yes or No?!

----

* Note:

Maybe Hillary just should have answered: “I don’t know” on the licenses-to-illegals question. “I don’t know but I’d like to listen to intelligent opinions on the subject before coming to any conclusions.”

She might’ve gotten beaten up on it at first but most of the others--except maybe Richardson--were looking to pounce on her anyway…to satisfy the voyeuristic bloodlust of Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, et al. But after the smoke cleared Hillary would’ve been seen as thoughtful, deliberative, wise, statesperson-like and presidential.

Is that too gooey an assessment…?

====

America's Armageddonites Push for More War

2007-11-05T12:35:00.000-08:00

By Jon Basil Utley
Foreign Policy in Focus
Posted on October 22, 2007

Utopian fantasies have long transfixed the human race. Yet today a much rarer fantasy has become popular in the United States. Millions of Americans, the richest people in history, have a death wish. They are the new "Armageddonites," fundamentalist evangelicals who have moved from forecasting Armageddon to actually trying to bring it about.

Most journalists find it difficult to take seriously that tens of millions of Americans, filled with fantasies of revenge and empowerment, long to leave a world they despise. These Armageddonites believe that they alone will get a quick, free pass when they are "raptured" to paradise, no good deeds necessary, not even a day of judgment. Ironically, they share this utopian fantasy with a group that they often castigate, namely fundamentalist Muslims who believe that dying in battle also means direct access to Heaven. For the Armageddonites, however, there are no waiting virgins, but they do agree with Muslims that there will be "no booze, no bars," in the words of a popular Gaither Singers song.

These end-timers have great influence over the U.S. government's foreign policy. They are thick with the Republican leadership. At a recent conference in Washington, congressional leader Roy Blunt, for example, has said that their work is "part of God's plan." At the same meeting, where speakers promoted attacking Iran, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay glorified "end times." Indeed the Bush administration often consults with them on Mideast policies. The organizer of the conference, Rev. John Hagee, is often welcomed at the White House, although his ratings are among the lowest on integrity and transparency by Ministry Watch, which rates religious broadcasters. He raises millions of dollars from his campaign supporting Israeli settlements on the West Bank, including much for himself. Erstwhile presidential candidate Gary Bauer is on his Board of Directors. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson also both expressed strong end-times beliefs.

American fundamentalists strongly supported the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. They consistently support Israel's hard-line policies. And they are beating the drums for war against Iran. Thanks to these end-timers, American foreign policy has turned much of the world against us, including most Muslims, nearly a quarter of the human race.

The Beginning of End Times

The evangelical movement originally was not so "end times" focused. Rather, it was concerned with the "moral" decline inside America. The Armageddon theory started with the writings of a Scottish preacher, John Nelson Darby (1800-1882). His ideas then spread to America with publication in 1917 of the Scofield Reference Bible, foretelling that the return of the Jews to Palestine would bring about the end times. The best-selling book of the 1970s, The Late, Great Planet Earth, further spread this message. The movement did not make a conscious effort to affect foreign policy until Jerry Falwell went to Jerusalem and the Left Behind books became best sellers.

Conservative Christian writer Gary North estimates the number of Armageddonites at about 20 million. Many of them have an ecstatic belief in the cleansing power of apocalyptic violence. They are among the more than 30% of Americans who believe that the world is soon coming to an end. Armageddonites may be a minority of the evangelicals, but they have vocal leaders and control 2,000 mostly fundamentalist religious radio stations.

Although little focused on in America, Armageddonites attract the attention of Muslims abroad. In 2004, for instance, I attended Qatar's Fifth Conference on Democracy with Muslim leaders from all over the Arabian Gulf. There, the uncle of Jordan's king devoted his whole speech to warning of the Armageddonites' power over American foreign policy.

Armageddonite Foreign Policy

The beliefs of the Armageddon Lobby, also known as Dispensationalists, come from the Book of Revelations, which Martin Luther relegated it to an appendix when he translated the Bible because its image of Christ was so contrary to the rest of the Bible. The Armageddonites worship a vengeful, killer-torturer Christ. They also frequently quote a biblical passage that God favors those who favor the Jews. But they only praise Jews who make war, not those who are peacemakers. For example, they vigorously opposed Israel's murdered premier Yitzhak Rabin, who promoted the Oslo Peace Accords.

Based on this Biblical interpretation, the Armageddonites vehemently argue that America must protect Israel and encourage its settlements on the West Bank in order to help God fulfill His plans. The return of Jews to Palestine is central to the prophetic vision of the Armageddonites, who see it as a critical step toward the final battle, Armageddon, and the victory of the righteous over Satan's minions. There are a couple internal inconsistencies with this prophecy, such as the presence of Christians already living in the Holy Land and the role of Jews in the final dispensation. In the first case, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other Religious Right leaders tried to pretend that Christians already in the Holy Land simply didn't exist. As for Jews, they needed to become "born again" Christians to avoid God's wrath (or, according to some Armageddonites, a separate Jewish covenant with God will gain them a separate Paradise).

Everyone else -- Buddhists, Muslims (of course), Hindus, atheists, and so on -- are then slated to die in the Tribulation that comes with Armageddon. As described in the bestselling Left Behind series, this time of human misery ends with Christ then ruling a paradise on earth for a thousand years.

Armageddonites know little about the outside world, which they think of as threatening and awash with Satanic temptations. They are big supporters of Bush's "go it alone" foreign policies. For example, they love John Bolton. They were prime supporters for attacking Iraq. And, with very few exceptions, they were noticeably quiet about, if not supportive, of torturing prisoners of war (only with a new leadership did the National Association of Evangelicals finally condemn torture in May, 2007). Their support of the Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani shows that they consider aggressively prosecuting Mideast war (to help speed up the apocalypse) more important than the domestic programs of these socially liberal politicians.

On other foreign policy issues, they are violently against the pending Law of the Seas Treaty, indeed any treaty which possibly circumscribes U.S. power to go it alone. They want illegal immigrants expelled and oppose more immigration. They fear China's growth. They despise Europeans for not being more warlike. The UN figures prominently in their fears, and the Left Behind books present its Secretary General as the Antichrist. Domestically, they strongly support the USA PATRIOT Act and all of President Bush's actions, legal or illegal.

Armageddonites and Fascism

Author and former New York Times reporter Christopher Hedges argues that worldview and reasoning of the Armageddonites tend toward fascism. In his book American Fascists, Hedges focuses on their obedience to leadership, their feelings of humiliation and victimhood, alienation, their support for authoritarian government, and their disinterestedness in constitutional limits on government power. Theirs was originally a defensive movement against the liberal democratic society, particularly abortion, school desegregation, and now globalization, which they saw as undermining their communities and families, their values, and livelihood. Their fundamentalism is very fulfilling and, Hedges writes, "they are terrified of losing this new, mystical world of signs, wonders and moral certitude, of returning to the old world of despair."

Hedges, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, also shows that fundamentalists are quite selective. They don't take the Bible literally when it comes to justifying slavery or that children who curse a parent are to be executed. The movement is also very masculine, giving poor men a path to re-establish their authority in what they perceive as an overly feminized culture.

Images of Jesus often show Him with thick muscles, clutching a sword. Christian men are portrayed as powerful warriors.

The overwhelming power and warmongering of the Armageddonites has inspired some resistance from other fundamentalists, but they are a minority. Theologian Richard Fenn writes, "Silent complicity (by mainline churches) with apocalyptic rhetoric soon becomes collusion with plans for religiously inspired genocide." Their death-wishing "religion" is actually anti-Christian and should be challenged openly by traditional Christians.

The next election will likely loosen their grip on the White House. However, their growing ties to the military industrial complex will remain. Exposure of their war wanting as a major threat to America and the world may well become as destructive for them as was the famous Scopes trial in the 1920s. But that will only happen if Americans become as concerned as foreign observers about the influence of the Armageddonites.

Jon Basil Utley is associate publisher of The American Conservative. He is a writer and advisor for Antiwar.com, a chairman of ConservativesForPeace.com, and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.

2007-11-04T13:42:00.001-08:00

In Defense of Hillary

2007-11-04T11:53:00.000-08:00

First, let me state from the outset, I’m for Dennis Kucinich, like I was in 2004. Second, I was for Jerry Brown over Bill Clinton in 1992. I don’t have to agree with or even like Hillary (or the Clintons) in order to defend her (or him) and point out inconsistencies and idiocies of Media. I recall certain commentators who should’ve known better (e.g. Mark Shields) declaring the Clinton Presidency over after the Zoë Baird nomination failed. Apparently, the utter lunacy, the butt-kissing and the sports analogies are still with us.

Although he obviously had a right to pose it, Russert’s question was a loaded one, related to an issue that doesn’t afford an easy lazy simplistic-for-simpletons yes or no answer. Hillary’s response was characteristic, but honest. Honestly imperfect, perhaps. That’s something the stooges of the Corporate Broadcast and Cable and significant segments of Print Media do not understand.

Is the “piling on” and exaggeration of the event in the aftermath of the debates responsible journalism? Are the suspect motivations of commercial news media in such cases to be ignored?

If it was Hillary Bush pre-Iraq Quagmire instead of Hillary Clinton I wonder how many free passes would be handed out. It’s not liberal media bias at the NYT so much as pro-Howell Raines bias. Let’s mangle the message in remembrance and homage to “our exiled leader”! I love the NYT. But it is not always right or true or just.

And where are the assessments of the deeply corrupt American electoral system and Corporate Media’s complicity in that corruption? Skillfully navigating that rigged system as best one can is a sin if caught outright in the commission of relatively minor gaffs. This Sunday morning on ABC‘s weekly political roundtable hosted by George Stephanopoulis, George Will croaked that while Bush could be accused of merely making slips of tongue Hillary was irrevocably excoriated for being overall slippery. And what would lying about War to Congress and the American People be, Mr. Will? And what would you call denying children healthcare (whether they be poor or from families in the increasingly economically distressed so-called middleclass) while this President, his Vice President, his collaborators courtiers concubines and divines and the congressional Republicans (being stingy with other people’s money collected largely from the People’s Republic of the North-Northeast and the Left Coast) receive Government (read: “socialist”) provided healthcare. For chrissakes…

BTW -- You think Hillary was hedging and equivocating and triangulating? If you want to see the master of hedging and equivocating and triangulating check out FDR during his run for the Presidency in 1932. That was a guy who managed to seduce the support of rightwingers, centrists and leftists. And, of course, by or before 1936 with the advent of the New Deal many of FDR’s former supporters such as Father Coughlin, William Randolph Hearst, Al Smith, Huey Long, etc. were amongst his harshest and most vociferous critics.

For the Political Lessons Files: In this life all too many people are envious and untrustworthy. If not about your wealth or health or looks, then about something. Loyalty is a rare commodity. Therefore, prize it, respect it; cultivate and reward it if and when you can find it, or it finds you.

Last things: FDR loved the Press. He took them in. He gave them drinks. He played them for the information-hungry suckers they were. News flash! They still are. So unless your skulls are extra-thick or egg-shell thin or you’re nurturing old grudges, if your calling is politics you’d do well to emulate success, rather than let isolation, out-of-touchness and paranoia bring you down with a resounding crash like it brought down Richard M. Nixon and like it‘s bringing down the Bush-Cheney camarilla and everyone in it.

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2007-11-04T05:21:00.001-08:00

Noun + Verb + 9/11 + Iran = Democrats’ Defeat?

2007-11-04T02:57:00.000-08:00

By FRANK RICH
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
November 4, 2007

WHEN President Bush started making noises about World War III, he only confirmed what has been a Democratic article of faith all year: Between now and Election Day he and Dick Cheney, cheered on by the mob of neocon dead-enders, are going to bomb Iran.

But what happens if President Bush does not bomb Iran? That is good news for the world, but potentially terrible news for the Democrats. If we do go to war in Iran, the election will indeed be a referendum on the results, which the Republican Party will own no matter whom it nominates for president. But if we don’t, the Democratic standard-bearer will have to take a clear stand on the defining issue of the race. As we saw once again at Tuesday night’s debate, the front-runner, Hillary Clinton, does not have one.

The reason so many Democrats believe war with Iran is inevitable, of course, is that the administration is so flagrantly rerunning the sales campaign that gave us Iraq. The same old scare tactic — a Middle East Hitler plotting a nuclear holocaust — has been recycled with a fresh arsenal of hyped, loosey-goosey intelligence and outright falsehoods that are sometimes regurgitated without corroboration by the press.

Mr. Bush has gone so far as to accuse Iran of shipping arms to its Sunni antagonists in the Taliban, a stretch Newsweek finally slapped down last week. Back in the reality-based community, it is Mr. Bush who has most conspicuously enabled the Taliban’s resurgence by dropping the ball as it regrouped in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Administration policy also opened the door to Iran’s lethal involvement in Iraq. The Iraqi “unity government” that our troops are dying to prop up has more allies in its Shiite counterpart in Tehran than it does in Washington.

Yet 2002 history may not literally repeat itself. Mr. Cheney doesn’t necessarily rule in the post-Rumsfeld second Bush term. There are saner military minds afoot now: the defense secretary Robert Gates, the Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen, the Central Command chief William Fallon. They know that a clean, surgical military strike at Iran could precipitate even more blowback than our “cakewalk” in Iraq. The Economist tallied up the risks of a potential Shock and Awe II this summer: “Iran could fire hundreds of missiles at Israel, attack American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, organize terrorist attacks in the West or choke off tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s oil windpipe.”

Then there’s the really bad news. Much as Iraq distracted America from the war against Al Qaeda, so a strike on Iran could ignite Pakistan, Al Qaeda’s thriving base and the actual central front of the war on terror. As Joe Biden said Tuesday night, if we attack Iran to stop it from obtaining a few kilograms of highly enriched uranium, we risk facilitating the fall of the teetering Musharraf government and the unleashing of Pakistan’s already good-to-go nuclear arsenal on Israel and India.

A full-scale regional war, chaos in the oil market, an overstretched American military pushed past the brink — all to take down a little thug like Ahmadinejad (who isn’t even Iran’s primary leader) and a state, however truculent, whose defense budget is less than 1 percent of America’s? Call me a Pollyanna, but I don’t think even the Bush administration can be this crazy.

Yet there is nonetheless a method to all the mad threats of war coming out of the White House. While the saber- rattling is reckless as foreign policy, it’s a proven winner as election-year Republican campaign strategy. The real point may be less to intimidate Iranians than to frighten Americans. Fear, the only remaining card this administration still knows how to play, may once more give a seemingly spent G.O.P. a crack at the White House in 2008.

Whatever happens in or to Iran, the American public will be carpet-bombed by apocalyptic propaganda for the 12 months to come. Mr. Bush has nothing to lose by once again using the specter of war to pillory the Democrats as soft on national security. The question for the Democrats is whether they’ll walk once more into this trap.

You’d think the same tired tactics wouldn’t work again after Iraq, a debacle now soundly rejected by a lopsided majority of voters. But even a lame-duck president can effectively wield the power of the bully pulpit. From Mr. Bush’s surge speech in January to Gen. David Petraeus’s Congressional testimony in September, the pivot toward Iran has been relentless.
Reinforcements are arriving daily. Dan Senor, the former flack for L. Paul Bremer in Baghdad, fronted a recent Fox News special, “Iran: The Ticking Bomb,” a perfect accompaniment to the Rudy Giuliani campaign that is ubiquitous on that Murdoch channel. The former Bush flack Ari Fleischer is a founder of Freedom’s Watch, a neocon fat-cat fund that has been spending $15 million for ads supporting the surge and is poised to up the ante for Iran war fever.

There are signs that the steady invocation of new mushroom clouds is already having an impact as it did in 2002 and 2003. A Zogby poll last month found that a majority of Americans (52 percent) now supports a pre-emptive strike on Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons.

In 2002 Senators Clinton, Biden, John Kerry, John Edwards and Chris Dodd all looked over their shoulders at such polls. They and the party’s Congressional leaders, Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt, voted for the Iraq war resolution out of the cynical calculation that it would inoculate them against charges of wussiness. Sure, they had their caveats at the time. They talked about wanting “to give diplomacy the best possible opportunity” (as Mr. Gephardt put it then). In her Oct. 10, 2002, speech of support for the Iraq resolution on the Senate floor, Mrs. Clinton hedged by saying, “A vote for it is not a vote to rush to war.”

We know how smart this strategic positioning turned out to be. Weeks later the Democrats lost the Senate.

This time around, with the exception of Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic candidates seem to be saying what they really believe rather than trying to play both sides against the middle. Only Mrs. Clinton voted for this fall’s nonbinding Kyl-Lieberman Senate resolution, designed by its hawk authors to validate Mr. Bush’s Iran policy. The House isn’t even going to bring up this malevolent bill because, as Nancy Pelosi has said, there has “never been a declaration by a Congress before in our history” that “declared a piece of a country’s army to be a terrorist organization.”

In 2002, the Iraq war resolution passed by 77 to 23. In 2007, Kyl-Lieberman passed by 76 to 22. No sooner did Mrs. Clinton cast her vote than she started taking heat in Iowa. Her response was to blur her stand. She abruptly signed on as the sole co- sponsor of a six-month-old (and languishing) bill introduced by the Virginia Democrat Jim Webb forbidding money for military operations in Iran without Congressional approval.

In Tuesday’s debate Mrs. Clinton tried to play down her vote for Kyl-Lieberman again by incessantly repeating her belief in “vigorous diplomacy” as well as the same sound bite she used after her Iraq vote five years ago. “I am not in favor of this rush for war,” she said, “but I’m also not in favor of doing nothing.”

Much like her now notorious effort to fudge her stand on Eliot Spitzer’s driver’s license program for illegal immigrants, this is a profile in vacillation. And this time Mrs. Clinton’s straddling stood out as it didn’t in 2002. That’s not because she was the only woman on stage but because she is the only Democratic candidate who has not said a firm no to Bush policy.

That leaves her in a no man’s — or woman’s — land. If Mr. Bush actually does make a strike against Iran, Mrs. Clinton will be the only leading Democrat to have played a cameo role in enabling it. If he doesn’t, she can no longer be arguing in the campaign crunch of fall 2008 that she is against rushing to war, because it would no longer be a rush. Her hand would be forced.
Mr. Biden got a well-deserved laugh Tuesday night when he said there are only three things in a Giuliani sentence: “a noun and a verb and 9/11.” But a year from now, after the public has been worn down by so many months more of effective White House propaganda, “America’s mayor” (or any of his similarly bellicose Republican rivals) will be offering voters the clearest possible choice, however perilous, about America’s future in the world.

Potentially facing that Republican may be a Democrat who is not in favor of rushing to war in Iran but, now as in 2002, may well be in favor of walking to war. In any event, she will not have been a leader in making the strenuous case for an alternative policy that defuses rather than escalates tensions with Tehran.

Noun + verb + 9/11 — also Mr. Bush’s strategy in 2004, lest we forget — would once again square off against a Democratic opponent who was for a pre-emptive war before being against it.

My Favorite Menace

2007-11-03T04:07:00.000-07:00

By GAIL COLLINS
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
November 3, 2007

The Law of the Sea Treaty has become a hot-button item in the Republican presidential race.

Say what?

“One of the defining issues of our time,” declared Mike Huckabee, who is leading an anti-treaty charge.

People, what do you think of when you hear “defining issues of our time?” Middle East? Global warming? Did it ever occur to you there are Americans who would say: “Law of the Sea Treaty?” Americans who are running for president of the United States? Americans who are rapidly moving up in the Iowa polls? This is close to “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” territory.

The treaty has been theoretically under consideration in Washington for a quarter of a century. Some might regard it nostalgically, like a 202-page lava lamp. It was approved by the United Nations in 1982, after endless negotiation during which attending Law of the Sea debates was named one of the Ten Most Boring Things To Do in New York. Its intent was to clarify rules for navigation and mining in international waters and set up a system for settling disputes. When it got to Washington, Britney Spears was still a toddler and Rudy Giuliani had a full head of hair. Ronald Reagan rejected it because he was worried about deep sea mining rights — manganese module mining to be exact.

Happily, that’s no longer an issue because:

a) The United Nations fixed the part Reagan had a problem with.

b) Manganese modules not quite as hot an item as they were when disco ruled.

Bill Clinton wanted the treaty, but gave up trying to find 67 votes in the Senate. Nothing much has happened since, except 155 other countries have ratified it, including several that didn’t exist when it was first passed. The United States, of course, is not the only nation holding back because of well-considered reservations. I hear Libya made some excellent points. And our side also includes all the parts of the Axis of Evil we have yet to invade.

Huckabee gave a speech to the values voters convention recently in which bashing the Law of the Sea got a roaring response from the social conservatives. This seemed to unnerve the other Republican candidates, most of whom are burdened by a personal history that does not involve quite as big a dose of family values as they might wish. Perhaps they are hoping that having a crazy position on the treaty makes up for one divorce. (Mitt Romney would want it to wipe out one waffle.)

I would love to give you all the arguments about the virtues of the Law of the Sea Treaty, but it seems like a cruel thing to do to readers on a Saturday. One problem with the debate is that the earnestness of the proponents is equaled only by their lack of pizazz. (The opponents call the treaty “LOST,” causing many innocent journalists to open their e-mails in hopes of getting new information on what really killed Mr. Eko in Season Three. The advocates call it “The Law of the Sea Convention.”) While the pros will tell you all about the importance of having a rational system for arbitrating disputes over the Alaskan continental shelf, the cons spin up conspiracy theories about how the International Seabed Authority will force us to give up our cars and cancel the war on terror.

Just take my word. The Navy wants the treaty. Greenpeace wants the treaty. The oil and gas industry wants the treaty. George W. Bush wants the treaty. (Look at it this way: he’s definitely due to be right on something.)

The number of people who really care about stopping the treaty is not large. But even if there were only 200, what if 120 of them go to the Iowa caucus? John McCain, who used to support the treaty, recently waved the white flag on a conservative Web site. “I think that we need a Law of the Sea,” he blogged. “I think it’s important, but I have not frankly looked too carefully at the latest situation as it is, but it would be nice if we had some of the provisions in it. But I do worry a lot about American sovereignty aspects of it, so I would probably vote against it in its present form.”

The other candidates have issued statements that seem to reflect an inability to come up with any rational arguments. Rudy Giuliani said he “cannot support the creation of yet another unaccountable international bureaucracy that might infringe on American sovereignty and curtail America’s freedoms,” and Fred Thompson roused himself long enough to announce that “the efforts of treaty proponents would be better spent reforming an ineffective, unaccountable and corrupt United Nations.” Mitt Romney’s spokesman just said Mitt has “concerns.”

Meanwhile, Mike Huckabee called the treaty “the dumbest thing we’ve ever done.”

Pause now to make a list of things we’ve done that you think might be dumber.

Worsening the Odds

2007-11-03T04:04:00.000-07:00

By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
November 3, 2007

Lonnie Lynam, a self-employed carpenter in Pipe Creek, Tex., specialized in spiral staircases. Friends thought of him as a maestro in a toolbelt, a whiz with a hammer and nails.

“His customers were always so pleased,” his mother told me. “There was this one family, kind of higher class, and he built them one of those glass holders that you would see in a bar or a lounge, with the glasses hanging upside down in different sizes. It was awesome.”

Lonnie had a following, a reputation. He was said to have a magic touch.

What he didn’t have was health insurance.

So when the headaches came, he tried to ignore them. “We’ve had migraines in our family,” said his mother, Betty Lynam, who is 67 and lives in Creston, Iowa. “So he thought that was what it was.”

Lonnie’s brother, Kelly, said: “He wasn’t the type to complain. And since he didn’t have insurance ...”

Kelly, 45, worked on different jobs with his brother. He was the one who rushed Lonnie to an emergency room one day last fall when the headaches became so severe that Lonnie couldn’t stand up.

It would be great if there were something unusual about this story: A person without health insurance gets sick. The person holds off on going to the doctor because there’s no way to pay the bill. The person is denied the full range of treatment because of the absence of insurance. The person dies.

Lonnie Lynam’s headaches had been caused by cancerous tumors in his brain. During surgery, doctors discovered that the cancer had spread from other parts of his body.

Cancer is no longer the all-but-automatic death sentence that it once was. Extraordinary progress has been made in fighting the myriad forms of the disease.

But, as the American Cancer Society has recently been stressing, the health coverage crisis in the U.S. is a major drag on this fight.

“A woman without health insurance who gets a breast cancer diagnosis is at least 40 percent more likely to die,” said John Seffrin, the cancer society’s chief executive.

According to the cancer society: “Uninsured patients and those on Medicaid are much more likely than those with private health insurance to be diagnosed with cancer in its later stages, when it is more often fatal.”

The uninsured (and underinsured) are also much less likely to get the most effective treatment after the diagnosis is made.

There are 47 million Americans without health insurance and another 17 million with coverage that will not pay for the treatments necessary to fight cancer and other very serious diseases.

The bottom line, said Mr. Seffrin, is that “the number of people who are suffering needlessly from cancer because they don’t have access to quality health care is very large and increasing as I speak.”

Part two of the Lynam family’s nightmare began when Lonnie returned home from the hospital. Lonnie had very little money, so Kelly stepped in and began paying most of his brother’s nonmedical bills.

Betty Lynam flew to Texas as often as she could to be with her son. She said he needed chemotherapy and radiation treatment, but since he couldn’t afford it, he couldn’t always get it.

“He was trying to pay a little bit at a time for the doctors and for the different treatments,” she said. “But he didn’t have a savings account or any collateral, except for his tools.

“I’d ask how he was feeling, and he’d tell me, ‘Well, I didn’t get the treatment today.’ And I’d say, ‘Why?’ And he’d say, ‘Well, I got in there and they found out I didn’t have any insurance and the woman told me I’d have to come back another time because she’d have to check with the doctor or somebody.’

“He suffered a great deal. Yes, he did.”

After awhile, as his condition deteriorated, Lonnie Lynam, carpenter extraordinaire, became all but consumed by the fear of death. Toward the end, he would sleep with a light and the television on, his mother said, “because he wanted to see something or hear something as soon as he woke up to know that he was still alive.”

She said: “Some nights he’d be so frightened he’d come crawl into bed with me and just say, ‘Hold me, mom.’ I just slept right with him in the hospital and just held him, you know?’”

Lonnie died on March 26 at age 45. The cause of death was cancer, aided and abetted by an absurd, unnecessary and utterly unconscionable absence of health insurance.

Scatchpad: Thurs. 1 Nov. 2007

2007-11-02T13:55:00.000-07:00

From the Utter Hypocrisy of the Right (who are invariably wrong) files:Give George W. Bush and Blackwater free rides.

However…

Burn the Stalinist Witch!

Keep attacking Hillary and see how well that plays with the women.

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Corporate Media prostitutes and intellectual lummoxes like Chris Matthews and most of the other folks (e.g. Mrs. Greenspan) over at MSNBC who--I suppose in the interest of upping ratings--did their worst to promote a fight between Hillary and Obama, are now declaring Hillary anathema because she supports Eliot Spitzer’s “unperfected” plan for identifying undocumented foreign workers, and allegedly flip-flopped on the response during the Dem debate the other night. (Is this going to be another Al Gore-invented-the-Internet Corporate Media-driven moment?) Did any of the Dems have an alternative? Not that I heard. Do any Republican candidates have an alternative--I mean, besides an electrified fence on the Mexican border with machine gun emplacements every 1000 yards.

You ought to see how many times FDR flip-flopped, hedged and played cagey. He and Abraham Lincoln (who often appeared weak and indecisive, probably couldn’t get elected today. At least not without having a few talking-heads thrown down the well… [Thx Borat] )

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Gay Anti-Gay Republicans…are also known as The Brotherhood of the Disappearing Pants.

At every turn they vote against anti-discrimination-against-Gays legislation, but meanwhile this is who they are privately. [Thx Stephanie.]

Aren‘t conservatives and libertarians supposed to be indifferent to private personal behavior unless it violates another person’s rights The bible-babblers and goose-stepping ultra-authoritarian nimrods are another story…

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FOX News alleged-comedian Dennis Miller derides Dennis Kucinich for seeing a UFO --”from the inside. In fact I think he was in the driver’s seat…!” Te-da-dum!

BTW -- Reagan also saw a UFO. [ Just punch up “Reagan” and “UFO”.]

(But we’re highly selective in “This Great Land” about who we ridicule …Repooplicker protocol and all that…)

Meanwhile…Kucinich might be the Magic Elf who can save us… [Thx Stephanie.]

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Afternotes:

Majestic 12 is the purported code name of a secret committee of scientists, military leaders, and government officials, supposedly formed in 1947 by an executive order of U.S. President Harry S. Truman. The purpose was to investigate UFO activity in the aftermath of the Roswell incident, the purported crash of an alien spaceship near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947. This alleged committee is an important part of the UFO conspiracy theory of an ongoing government cover up of UFO information.

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Sean Hannity called Halloween a “liberal holiday”. Joking? Or insane?

Alan Colmes said he went out trick-or-treating on Halloween as a Republican taking candy away from kids.

Xmas is another liberal holiday…because you’re supposed to give to the Poor. [Thx Stephanie.]

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Blackwater Mamluks, Inc. must accept responsibility for their murderous perfidy, abject greed and complete and total folly. What the hell kind of self-important killer-insects are they, anyway? A bunch of frigging goose-stepping black-shirts...Just what America needs, more fascists pumped on steroids with guns...

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Tim Russert and Chris Matthews are Rightwing tools. But what do you expect from NBC whose Big War Industry Mother Company is GE? What are they going to do, have Elizabeth Kucinich and Noam Chomsky as moderators? (And whatever happened to Phil Donahue? Too liberal. Too Green. Too responsible. Too sane. And sanity doesn‘t sell. If America were sane they‘d have dumped Crapitalism a long time ago. But it‘s essentially a country of superstition-ridden frightened little sniveling serfs and corn-fed brain-dead parishioners. )

Always remember, anyone working for Big Media has in some way shape or form been co-opted and compromised.

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Giuliani’s recent statements in a political advertisement on treatment for his prostate cancer were lies or hypocritical. He sneers at “socialized medicine” yet having been Mayor of NYC he received “socialized” tax-payer funded healthcare himself.

Rudy erroneously claimed only 44% of those diagnosed with prostate cancer in the UK were cured. He got that from Manhattan Institute--a rightwing thinktank with a vested interest in promoting laissez-faire solutions to everything--especially where the exploited workingclass and the suffering poor are concerned.

However, 74.4% is the accurate percentage for prostate cancer cures in the UK, according to guess who? The UK itself!

Furthermore, the treatment Rudy received was invented not by an American but by a Danish physician and medical researcher. You remember Denmark, don’t you? With its nasty socialized healthcare system? [Thx to Lionel.]

Why don’t fatheads like Tim Russert, Chris Matthews and the FOX News Zombies jump on Rudy Giuliani as hard as they jump on Hillary Clinton for not giving them the simplistic-for-simpletons responses they want to their loaded one-dimensional questions?

The GOP has no answers for the problems of the Modern World. And Corporate Broadcast and Cable Media--with very few exceptions--delivers less and less genuine News (i.e. information the People need to help keep themselves Free).

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Greenpagan’s Quotidian Quotations:

2007-10-28T05:33:00.000-07:00

Motto: My loyalty is reserved for the country with the most generous social safety net.

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Better they shouldn’t even know we’re here. -- old Jewish saying

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“If you have the story, tell it. If you don’t have the story, write it.” -- Paul Sann, late Executive Editor of the old New York Post then owned and published by Dorothy Schiff (c. 1960s-70s).

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If you’ve got the muck, I’ve got the rake…

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“As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.” --Leonardo Da Vinci

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"Study the past if you would define the future." -- Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)

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“If you’re going through hell, keep going.” -- Winston Churchill

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When and under what circumstances is it morally acceptable to respond to The Oppressor with violence?

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"A good body with a dull brain is as cheap as life itself." -- Batiatus (from the movie Spartacus)

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The sky isn’t falling. But the bottom’s dropping out…

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"This age thinks better of a gilded fool than of a threadbare saint in wisdom's school!" -- Thomas Dekker

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"Nothing is more real than nothing." -- Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies (New York: Grove, 1956; p. 16).

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“The dignity of truth is lost with much protesting.” -- Ben Jonson, Catilene’s Conspiracy III, ii.

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Bastian - But it's only a story. It's not real. It's only a story. […]
The Empress - Bastian! Why don't you do what you dreamed Bastian?
Bastian - But I can't! I have to keep my feet on the ground.

-- The Neverending Story

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Rudy, the Values Slayer

2007-10-27T20:39:00.000-07:00

By FRANK RICH
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
October 28, 2007

WITH the new president heading off to his Texas vacation during that slow news month of August 2001, I wrote a column about a man who would never be president: Rudy Giuliani. Banished from Gracie Mansion after dumping his second wife for Judith Nathan, New York’s lame-duck mayor had been bunking for two months with a gay couple. No brand-name American politician had ever publicly done such a thing, so I decided to pay a visit to Rudy’s home away from home.

His Honor was out that day, but Howard Koeppel, a garrulous Queens car dealer, and his partner, Mark Hsiao, a Juilliard-trained pianist, were gracious tour guides to their 32nd-floor apartment on East 57th Street. I asked Mr. Koeppel, a born comic, whether it was unexpected that Rudy would live with an openly gay couple. “I don’t know if it’s any more unusual than him wearing a dress,” he deadpanned. On a more sober note, Mr. Koeppel told me that the connubially challenged mayor was an admirer of his and Mr. Hsiao’s relatively “idyllic life” and had assured them that “if they ever legalized gay marriages, we would be the first one he would do.”

That this same Rudy Giuliani would emerge as the front-runner in the Republican pack six years later is the great surprise of the 2008 presidential campaign to date, especially to the political press. Since the dawn of the new century, it has been the rarely questioned conventional wisdom, handed down by Karl Rove, that no Republican can rise to the top of the party or win the presidency without pandering as slavishly as George W. Bush has to the most bullying and gay-baiting power brokers of the religious right.

When Rudy’s candidacy started to show legs, pundits and family values activists alike assumed that ignorant voters knew only his 9/11 video reel and not his personal history or his stands on issues. “Americans do not yet realize how far outside of the mainstream of conservative thought that Mayor Giuliani’s social views really are,” declared Tony Perkins, the Family Research Council leader, in February. But despite Rudy’s fleeting stabs at fudging his views, they are well known now, and still he leads in national polls of Republican voters and is neck and neck with Fred Thompson in the Bible Belt sanctuary of South Carolina.

There are various explanations for this. One is that 9/11 and terrorism fears trump everything. Another is that the rest of the field is weak. But the most obvious explanation is the one that Washington resists because it contradicts the city’s long-running story line. Namely, that the political clout ritualistically ascribed to Mr. Perkins, James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Gary Bauer of American Values and their ilk is a sham.

These self-promoting values hacks don’t speak for the American mainstream. They don’t speak for the Republican Party. They no longer speak for many evangelical ministers and their flocks. The emperors of morality have in fact had no clothes for some time. Should Rudy Giuliani end up doing a victory dance at the Republican convention, it will be on their graves.

Part of their demise, of course, can be attributed to the pileup of personal hypocrisies that have always undone Elmer Gantrys in America, from Jimmy Swaggart to Jim Bakker. The Ted Haggard revelations were in that tawdry tradition, and so was the news that the Christian Coalition’s front man, Ralph Reed, looked forward, as he put it, to “humping in corporate accounts” in collaboration with the now-jailed K Street lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Their fall from grace was synergistically augmented by their scandal-prone family-values allies on Capitol Hill.

Even now, the virulent marriage defender David Vitter retains his Senate seat despite having confessed to unspecified sins after his name surfaced in bordello scandals in both Washington and New Orleans.

Also staying put in the Senate is Larry Craig, who, consciously or not, is calling the whole moral brigade’s bluff. After he was busted in the Minneapolis airport, Republicans insisted he undergo an ethics committee investigation on the assumption that he’d disappear before they could conduct it. Now they will have to make good on their word.

Mr. Craig is not just refusing to leave, but, as he demonstrated to Matt Lauer, he is ready, willing and able to re-enact his toilet pas de deux on national television. The Larry Craig show could be C-Span’s hit of the election season. It will culminate with its star’s return to the scene of the crime during the Republican National Convention, which, as perverse poetic justice would have it, is taking place in Minneapolis.

But the most significant — and happiest — explanation for the values czars’ demise as a political force is that white evangelical Christians and a new generation of evangelical leaders have themselves steadily tacked a different course from the Dobson crowd. A CBS News poll this month parallels what the Times reporter David D. Kirkpatrick found in his examination of evangelicals for today’s Times Magazine. Like most other Americans, they are more interested in hearing from presidential candidates about the war in Iraq and health care than about any other issues.

Abortion and same-sex marriage landed at the bottom of that list; fighting poverty outpolled abortion as a personal priority by a 3-to-2 margin. To see just how large a gap separates that evangelical electorate from the values organizations that purport to speak in its name, just look at the Values Voter Summit that the Family Research Council convened to much press attention in Washington last weekend. In a survey of participants to determine which issue would be “most important” in choosing a presidential candidate, the summit’s organizers didn’t even think to list the war, health care or fighting poverty among the 12 hot-button options.

The Values Voter Summit’s survey of the attendees’ presidential preferences showed just as large a disconnect. Rudy Giuliani came in next to last (behind Tom Tancredo, ahead of John McCain) in the field of nine candidates, earning only 1.85 percent of the vote. By contrast, among white evangelicals nationwide in the CBS News poll, he was in a statistical dead heat for first place with Fred Thompson; indeed, Mr. Giuliani’s 26 percent among evangelicals nearly matches his showing among all Republican voters. The discrepancy between the CBS poll and the summit survey leaves you wondering who exactly follows Dr. Dobson and Mr. Perkins beyond the ticket buyers who showed up for their media circus last weekend at the Washington Hilton.

Of late Dr. Dobson has been throwing a hissy fit about Rudy’s rise, reminiscent of his 2005 condemnation of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants for appearing in what he labeled a “pro-homosexual video.” Apparently suffering from the delusion that he has the pull on the right that Ralph Nader once did on the left, he has threatened to bolt to a third party. But for all this huffing and puffing, Dr. Dobson and his stop-Rudy brigade are as politically hypocritical as the Reverend Haggard was sexually hypocritical.

If they really believed uncompromisingly in their issues and principles, they would have long since endorsed either Sam Brownback, the zealous Kansas senator fond of using fetus photos as political props, or Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who spent 15 years as a Baptist preacher, calls abortion a “holocaust” and believes in intelligent design rather than evolution.

But they gave Senator Brownback so little moral and financial support that he folded his candidacy a week ago. And they continue to stop well short of embracing Mr. Huckabee, no matter how many rave reviews his affable personality receives on the campaign trail. They shun him because they know he’ll lose, and they would rather compromise principle than back a loser.

Backing a loser, they know, would even further diminish their waning Washington status in a post-Rove, post-Bush G.O.P. The more they shed their illusion of power, the more they imperil their ability to rake in big bucks from their apocalyptic direct-mail campaigns. They must choose mammon over God if they are to maintain the many values rackets that make up their various business empires.

Hilariously enough, some other big names on the right, typified by Sean Hannity of Fox News, are capitulating to the Giuliani candidacy by pretending that he, like the incessantly flip-flopping Mitt Romney, is reversing his previously liberal record on social issues. The straw they cling to is Rudy’s promise to appoint “strict constructionist” judges to the Supreme Court.

Even leaving aside the Giuliani record in New York (where his judicial appointees were mostly Democrats), the more Democratic Senate likely to emerge after 2008 is a poor bet to confirm a Scalia or Alito even should a Republican president nominate one. No matter how you slice it, the Giuliani positions on abortion, gay rights and gun control remain indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton’s.

“You have absolutely nothing to fear from me,” Rudy disingenuously told the assembled at the Values Voter Summit last weekend. Actually, there’s plenty for everyone to fear from a Giuliani presidency, starting with the mad neocon bombers shaping his apocalyptic policy toward Iran.

But that’s another story. Whichever candidate or party lands in the White House, this much is certain: Inauguration Day 2009 is at the very least Armageddon for the reigning ayatollahs of the American right.

W.M.D. in Iran? Q.E.D.

2007-10-27T20:36:00.000-07:00

By MAUREEN DOWD
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
October 28, 2007

TIM RUSSERT: Mr. Vice President, welcome to “Meet the Press.”

VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: Good morning, Tim.

RUSSERT: How close are we to war with Iran?

CHENEY: Well, I think we are in the final stages of diplomacy, obviously. We have done virtually everything we can with respect to carrots, if you will. It’s time for squash. Not to mention mushrooms, clouds of them.

RUSSERT: But you squashed Iraq and that didn’t work out so well.

CHENEY: Iraq will be fine, Tim. It just needs a firmer hand. We learned that lesson. We’re not going to get hung up on democracy this time. (Expletive) purple thumbs.

RUSSERT: Isn’t Secretary Rice still pushing carrots for Iran?

CHENEY: The more carrots Condi feeds ’em, the better they’ll be able to see the bombs coming.

RUSSERT: First you threatened to take action if Iran built a nuclear weapon. Now you’re threatening to take action if Iran knows how to build a nuclear weapon. What’s next? You threaten to take action if Ahmadinejad dresses up as a nuclear weapon for Halloween?

CHENEY: Well, the difficulty here is, each time he has rejected what he was called upon to do by the international community. I’m not sure now, no matter what he says, that anyone would believe him. He’s pretending he doesn’t have W.M.D., just like Saddam.

RUSSERT: But Saddam didn’t have W.M.D.

CHENEY: He did, Tim.

RUSSERT: He did?

CHENEY: Ever wonder what happened to them?

RUSSERT: What happened to them?

CHENEY: Think about it, Tim.

RUSSERT: The New York Times reported yesterday that the suspected nuclear reactor in Syria bombed by Israeli jets was well under construction in 2003, the same year we went to war with Syria’s neighbor Iraq. Did we go after the wrong country?

CHENEY: Syria is not a country, Tim. It’s a way station run by an eye doctor.

RUSSERT: Conservatives are tossing around some lock-and-load language. The president is talking about Iran sparking a “nuclear holocaust” and World War III. Giuliani adviser Norman Podhoretz thinks we’re in World War IV. Shouldn’t you at least give the new sanctions against Iran a chance to work?

CHENEY: Oh, we have, Tim. The sanctions were announced Thursday. It’s now Sunday. I think things have gotten so bad inside Iran, from the standpoint of the Iranian people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.

RUSSERT: But what if your analysis is not correct — again? Let’s put up on the screen part of an interview The New York Times’s Thom Shanker did with the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen: “With America at war in two Muslim countries, he said, attacking a third Islamic nation in the region ‘has extraordinary challenges and risks associated with it.’ The military option, he said, should be a last resort.” Your own chairman of the Joint Chiefs does not think the military can handle a third war.

CHENEY: If Admiral Mullen wants to be Admiral Sullen, that’s his business. I’m not going to be a defeatist or question the courage of our fighting men.

RUSSERT: Critics say that if you attack Iran, there will be riots in every Muslim capital, the Iranians will flood Iraq with more explosives and money for the Shiite militias. They say you’ll only end up making more enemies for America, and our troops.

CHENEY: Why don’t we just give the Islamofascists Sudetenland, Tim? Peace in our time.

RUSSERT: The Europeans are upset that you might start another war in their backyard.

CHENEY: (Rolling his eyes and muttering under his breath) Eurappeasers.

RUSSERT: An Iranian spokesman dismissed the new U.S. sanctions as “worthless and ineffective” and said they were “doomed to fail as before.” And Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, the head of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards — a group you have accused of proliferating weapons of mass destruction — also warned that his forces would respond with an “even more decisive” strike if attacked.

CHENEY: Don’t worry about General Ali Baba, Tim. We gave the Israelis his home address.

RUSSERT: How will you even know where to bomb, given that all the experts say the Iranians have hidden their real nuclear facilities underground?

CHENEY: Can you say magic carpet bombing, Tim? We didn’t build those bunker busters just to stack ’em up in a warehouse in North Dakota.

RUSSERT: It’s so close to the next election, Mr. Vice President, shouldn’t you just keep on the diplomatic track and let the next president make this decision?

CHENEY: You really want Rudy Giuliani playing with the nuclear button, Tim? Now, that’s insane.

2007-10-23T14:28:00.000-07:00

Money Trumps Peace...Sometimes

2007-10-23T14:18:00.000-07:00

Published on Thursday, February 15, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

by Cindy Sheehan

It is always painful to watch George stumble his way through press conferences. He can’t get through a sentence without at least two-three “uhs,” his eye lids flutter up and down in what my daughter, Carly, calls the “liar’s blink” and just because it is painful that a human like that is ostensibly the leader of the free world. There is always a plethora of things that he says, does, or screws up on to write about but this time what caught my attention happened during the Q & A. George was asked if he thought the economic sanctions on Iran would work because so many European nations trade with that country.

He stopped to collect his thoughts with what he thought must’ve looked like a studied and careful demeanor, but more like someone with a sour tummy, and said: “well, let’s put it this way…money trumps peace, sometimes. In other words, commercial interests are very powerful interests throughout the world," (I added the italics). It is always interesting with people who frequently play fast and loose with the truth, such as the liars in BushCo, once in awhile, if they talk long enough they tell a truth.

“Money trumps peace” is the fundamental reason for the invasions and subsequent gory and violent occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. In Richard Behan’s excellent article: From Iraq to Afghanistan: Connecting the Dots with Oil, he brilliantly follows the history of the oil-money trail in these countries that are one, rich in oil, and two, well placed for the transportation and delivery of oil. Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan, or their leaders or governments had anything to do with 9-11, but they were in the way of oil and other industries that profit from oil, so they had to go. Money trumped peace in those countries and they are destroyed and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Afghanis and Americans have been slaughtered because they were blocking American imperialistic profiteering.

“Money trumps peace” is the underlying reason for all wars as two time Congressional Medal of Honor winner and highly decorated Major General Smedley D. Butler wrote in his reflective, yet prophetic, work War is a Racket:

WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

During the short booklet which every prospective parent, current parent and every teen should read thoroughly and often, he keeps referring to World War I as the “World War” because he was writing directly after the “Great War;” the “war to end all wars.” There was no World War II…yet. General Butler was no unwashed, hippie peace-nik. He was a warrior who, as often times happens when men face the horrors of war (“War is hell:” General Sherman), saw the futility of killing as a diplomatic tool that kills and maims our young people for “the benefit of the very few.”

“Money trumps peace” should be the rallying call of all the Democrats and Republicans who are exploiting our tired and wounded soldiers in the field to justify handing BushCo more money to complete his mission of totally decimating the Middle East for the oil companies, construction contractors, and defense industries. How many times have we heard: “We have to vote for the emergency funding for the troops.” That money is not for the troops, never has been for the troops, and the troops in the field wouldn’t need any support if they used the money that was already in the pipeline to bring our soldiers and marines home from the killing deserts. I talked to a young lady at a university in Minnesota whose good friend was a Marine in Iraq who just got home and one of the only things that he shared with her was that he had to eat ants. If you don’t believe me, just ask Mr. “You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want.” Our troops have never been supported in this monstrous mistake of a war and they have never received the tools they need to survive, let alone be successful in their so-called mission. The money goes to one thousand dollar a day mercenaries---not our two thousand dollar a month grunts.

“Money trumps peace” when while asking for tens of billions of more dollars for war, George is balancing the budget off of the backs of vets who have served this country honorably by cutting back on VA benefits. Many times I am asked: “What would you say to Bush if you were to meet with him now?” I think my first question would be: “How the hell do you look at yourself in the mirror?” How dare he?

“Money trumps peace” is one of the reasons why true peace won’t be possible when our country is mis-governed by people who are beholden to and entrenched in the military industrial complex. K-Street palm greasers have an easier passage in the Halls of Congress than do activists with petitions, or a Gold Star Mother wearing a “protest shirt” do.

“Money trumps peace” is the problem when some leaders of Congress, who should be working day and night to bring our troops home to save Iraq and the lives and souls of our brave soldiers and marines, are out raising money for presidential campaigns that are still a year away. Sometime between now and the first primaries in 2008 we will be holding vigils for the 4000th troop killed in Iraq and thousands of Iraqi families will be overcome with grief and pain while the talking head shows are already consumed by election fever.

“Money will always trump peace” unless BushCo are impeached, removed from office and imprisoned for leading our military like lambs to the slaughter to die for Raytheon, Halliburton and Blackwater Security.

“Money will always trump peace” until we the people demand that our tax dollars remain in our communities, schools, and families and not directly funneled from The Treasury Department to the Pentagon, so that our children do not have to offer themselves up as these human sacrificial lambs.

Peace can and should trump money, but only if we are willing to stand up and challenge the continuing and immoral perception that “Money trumps peace.”

Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Sheehan who was killed in Bush's war of terror on 04/04/04. She is the co-founder and president of Gold Star Families for Peace and the Camp Casey Peace Institute. She is the author of three books, the most recent is: Peace Mom: A Mother's Journey Through Heartache to Activism.

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

2007-10-23T14:04:00.000-07:00

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all

Naomi Wolf
Tuesday April 24, 2007

Guardian

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2. Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3. Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens' groups

The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".

"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.

"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."

"That'll do it," the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.

7. Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10. Suspend the rule of law

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

Elizabeth Kucinich on Impeachment

2007-10-22T12:50:00.000-07:00

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Gone Baby Gone

2007-10-22T08:17:00.000-07:00

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
October 22, 2007

It pains me to say this, but this time Alan Greenspan is right about housing.

Mr. Greenspan was wrong in 2004, when he sang the praises of adjustable-rate mortgages. He was wrong in 2005, when he dismissed the idea that there was a national housing bubble, suggesting that at most there was some “froth” in the market. He was wrong last fall, when he suggested that the worst of the housing slump was behind us. (Housing starts have fallen 30 percent since then.)

But his latest pronouncement — that the market rescue plan being pushed by Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, is likely to make things worse rather than better — looks all too accurate.

To understand why, we need to talk about the nature of the mess.

First of all, as I could have told you — actually, I did — there was indeed a huge national housing bubble.

What even those of us who realized that there was a bubble didn’t appreciate, however, was how much of a threat the bursting of that bubble would pose to financial markets.

Today, when a bank makes a home loan, it doesn’t hold on to it. Instead, it quickly sells the mortgage off to financial engineers, who chop up, repackage and resell home loans pretty much the way supermarkets chop up, repackage and resell meat.

It’s a business model that depends on trust. You don’t know anything about the cows that contributed body parts to your package of ground beef, so you have to trust the supermarket when it assures you that the beef is U.S.D.A. prime. You don’t know anything about the subprime mortgage loans that were sliced, diced and pureed to produce that mortgage-backed security, so you have to trust the seller — and the rating agency — when they assure you that it’s a AAA investment.

But in the case of housing-related investments, investors’ trust was betrayed. Supposedly safe investments suddenly turned into junk bonds when the housing bubble burst. High profits reported by hedge funds — profits that were reflected in huge payments to the fund managers — turn out to have been based on wishful thinking.

Thus, when two hedge funds run by Ralph Cioffi of Bear Stearns imploded last summer, it came as a huge shock to many investors, and helped trigger a market panic. But a recent BusinessWeek report shows that the funds were a disaster waiting to happen. The funds borrowed huge amounts, and invested the proceeds in questionable mortgage-backed securities.

Even worse, “more than 60 percent of their net worth was tied up in exotic securities whose reported value was estimated by Cioffi’s own team.” We’re profitable because we say we are — just trust us. That hasn’t ever caused problems, has it?

Stories like this have led to a crisis of confidence. The current yield on one-month U.S. government bills is only 3.41 percent, an amazingly low number, and a sign that people are parking their money in government debt because they don’t trust private borrowers. And the result is a shortage of liquidity — the ability to raise cash — that is greatly damaging the economy.

Which brings us to the rescue plan proposed by a group of large banks, with Mr. Paulson’s backing.

Right now the bleeding edge of the crisis in confidence involves worries that there may be large losses hidden inside so-called “structured investment vehicles” — basically hedge funds that borrow from the public and invest the proceeds in mortgage-backed securities. The new plan would create a “super-fund,” the Master Liquidity Enhancement Conduit, which would seek to restore confidence by, um, borrowing from the public and investing the proceeds in mortgage-backed securities.

The plan, in other words, looks like an attempt to solve the problem with smoke and mirrors.

That might work if there were no good reason for investors to be worried. But in this case, investors have very good reasons to worry: the bursting of the housing bubble means that someone, somewhere, has to accept several trillion dollars in losses. A significant part of these losses will fall on mortgage-backed securities. And given this reality, the “conduit” looks like a really bad idea.

I’d put it like this: Investors aren’t putting their money to work because they don’t know where the bad debts are. And when investors need clarity, the last thing you want to be doing is pumping out more smoke.

Mr. Greenspan’s take, expressed in an interview with the magazine Emerging Markets, seems broadly similar. “If you believe some form of artificial non-market force is propping up the market,” he said, “you don’t believe the market price has exhausted itself.”

Translated: this rescue scheme could be seen as an attempt to hide the bad debts everyone knows are out there, and as a result could delay any return of trust to the markets.

Alan Greenspan is making sense.

Cougars, Archers, Snipers

2007-10-21T12:39:00.000-07:00

By MAUREEN DOWD
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
October 21, 2007

WASHINGTON

I’m a microtrend.

Hillary’s programmer says so. I’m mentioned in a section of Mark Penn’s new book, “Microtrends,” called “Impressionable Elites.”

It could have been worse. At least I wasn’t in the sections on Cougars, French Teetotalers, The Mildly Disordered, Aspiring Snipers or Unisexuals.

Unisex, a trend started by hip hair salons in the ’70s, has blossomed into a “third-sex category” that some say will be “the next wave of the civil rights movement,” Mr. Penn writes.

“Sure, only a few people take opposite-sex hormones, or dress up in their spouse’s clothes,” he says, “but since the 1970s there has been a substantial blurring of the line between ‘male’ and ‘female’ in terms of habits, tastes, and fashions. And the marketers are picking up on it.”

That would be corporate marketers and Hillary Marketers (more of a macrotrend). Her political hucksters and Power Pointers are trying to help the New York senator blur the line between “male” and “female” enough to become the first commanderess in chief.

In “Microtrends,” the chapters all read like reports that Mr. Penn wrote for clients. Whether or not they’re trends, they’re certainly micro — marketing studies gussied up as social science. As with Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point,” this book is less social philosophy than a fancy way to sell stuff. Why use red aluminum cans if you can sell more of the product in pink aluminum cans?

Why rely on a candidate’s charisma and beliefs if you can break down the country into microconstituencies — from Archery Moms to Surgery Lovers to Uptown Tattooed — and then devise policies to appeal to them?

In the “Impressionable Elites” section, Mr. Penn writes that he does not like it when New York Times writers “trend toward the personal.”

“Sure, likability and buddy potential are important in choosing a president,” he sniffs. “But are they more important than solving health care and creating jobs? Most Americans say no. Frankly, the only people who say yes are the very well-to-do. And the chattering classes, in the media.”

I understand that Mr. Penn is touchy on the likability issue. Whether he likes it or not, personality influences how Americans choose presidents. And on the trail, Hillary comes across more as a pile of diligently digested data than a joyful flesh-and-blood creature.

But Mr. Penn is the one who has conjured a story line designed to make her more likable: the middle-class girl from the middle of the country with Midwest values who wants to govern from the middle. McGovernick? Meshugana!

And, while he scoffs at the rightful place of the personal in the political, he’s the one carving up the political into the personal, dividing (and hopefully conquering) voters by ludicrously discrete traits: Caffeine Crazies. Late-Breaking Gays. Hard-of-Hearers. Bourgeois and Bankrupt. Ardent Amazons. Shy Millionaires. (These section titles read like a new lineup of Fox reality shows.)

At a press breakfast in Washington last week, Mr. Penn elaborated on his point, musing that perhaps newspapers festooned their straight policy reporting once they “realized that they might get more readership by focusing a little bit more on style and personality.”

The pollster is so used to dicing data into bite-sized pieces that the big picture may have eluded him: History shows that leaders’ personalities and policies are inextricably, and sometimes tragically, entwined. L.B.J.’s DNA led to Vietnam as Nixon’s led to Watergate as Reagan’s led to Iran-contra as Bill’s led to Monica as Hillary’s led to her health care fiasco as W.’s led to the Iraq imbroglio.

Bill Clinton elevated his neuroses into a management style, running a chaotic White House that took its tempo from his adolescent indulgences and from his volatile marriage. The West Wing weather was determined by the Clintons’ strange emotional and political co-dependence.

In her acid flashback of a new book, “For Love of Politics,” Sally Bedell Smith describes how First Lady Hillary routinely unmanned Bill and his aides, and engaged in sharp spurts of temper that sparked his temper.

“Hillary’s anger was bound up in the intricacies of her marital bargain, which engendered rivalry and resentment along with mutual dependence,” Ms. Smith writes. Political power was her reward for his marital infidelity.

When Bill explains why Hillary should be president, his subtext is clear: We owe it to her for all she put up with from me.

At the breakfast, a reporter asked Mr. Penn if the campaign has polled to figure out how to proceed if Bill’s personal foibles once more take Hillaryland hostage.

The pollster who believes that data trumps DNA brushed off the question, complimenting the former president as “a tremendous asset.”

But if you think that Hillary doesn’t have connubial contingency plans in place, you’re disregarding his DNA — and hers.

Suicide Is Not Painless

2007-10-21T05:41:00.000-07:00

By FRANK RICH
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
October 21, 2007

IT was one of those stories lost in the newspaper’s inside pages. Last week a man you’ve never heard of — Charles D. Riechers, 47, the second-highest-ranking procurement officer in the United States Air Force — killed himself by running his car’s engine in his suburban Virginia garage.

Mr. Riechers’s suicide occurred just two weeks after his appearance in a front-page exposé in The Washington Post. The Post reported that the Air Force had asked a defense contractor, Commonwealth Research Institute, to give him a job with no known duties while he waited for official clearance for his new Pentagon assignment. Mr. Riechers, a decorated Air Force officer earlier in his career, told The Post: “I really didn’t do anything for C.R.I. I got a paycheck from them.” The question, of course, was whether the contractor might expect favors in return once he arrived at the Pentagon last January.

Set against the epic corruption that has defined the war in Iraq, Mr. Riechers’s tragic tale is but a passing anecdote, his infraction at most a misdemeanor. The $26,788 he received for two months in a non-job doesn’t rise even to a rounding error in the Iraq-Afghanistan money pit. So far some $6 billion worth of contracts are being investigated for waste and fraud, however slowly, by the Pentagon and the Justice Department. That doesn’t include the unaccounted-for piles of cash, some $9 billion in Iraqi funds, that vanished during L. Paul Bremer’s short but disastrous reign in the Green Zone. Yet Mr. Riechers, not the first suicide connected to the war’s corruption scandals, is a window into the culture of the whole debacle.

Through his story you can see how America has routinely betrayed the very values of democratic governance that it hoped to export to Iraq. Look deeper and you can see how the wholesale corruption of government contracting sabotaged the crucial mission that might have enabled us to secure the country: the rebuilding of the Iraqi infrastructure, from electricity to hospitals. You can also see just why the heretofore press-shy Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater USA, staged a rapid-fire media blitz a week ago, sitting down with Charlie Rose, Lara Logan, Lisa Myers and Wolf Blitzer.

Mr. Prince wasn’t trying to save his employees from legal culpability in the deaths of 17 innocent Iraqis mowed down on Sept. 16 in Baghdad. He knows that the legal loopholes granted contractors by Mr. Bremer back in 2004 amount to a get-out-of-jail-free card. He knows that Americans will forget about another 17 Iraqi casualties as soon as Blackwater gets some wrist-slapping punishment.

Instead, Mr. Prince is moving on, salivating over the next payday. As he told The Wall Street Journal last week, Blackwater no longer cares much about its security business; it is expanding into a “full spectrum” defense contractor offering a “one-stop shop” for everything from remotely piloted blimps to armored trucks. The point of his P.R. offensive was to smooth his quest for more billions of Pentagon loot.

Which brings us back to Mr. Riechers. As it happens, he was only about three degrees of separation from Blackwater. His Pentagon job, managing a $30 billion Air Force procurement budget, had been previously held by an officer named Darleen Druyun, who in 2004 was sentenced to nine months in prison for securing jobs for herself, her daughter and her son-in-law at Boeing while favoring the company with billions of dollars of contracts. Ms. Druyun’s Pentagon post remained vacant until Mr. Riechers was appointed. He was brought in to clean up the corruption.

Yet the full story of the corruption during Ms. Druyun’s tenure is even now still unknown. The Bush-appointed Pentagon inspector general delivered a report to Congress full of holes in 2005. Specifically, black holes: dozens of the report’s passages were redacted, as were the names of many White House officials in the report’s e-mail evidence on the Boeing machinations.

The inspector general also assured Congress that neither Donald Rumsfeld nor Paul Wolfowitz knew anything about the crimes. Senators on the Armed Services Committee were incredulous. John Warner, the Virginia Republican, could not believe that the Pentagon’s top two officials had no information about “the most significant defense procurement mismanagement in contemporary history.”

But the inspector general who vouched for their ignorance, Joseph Schmitz, was already heading for the exit when he delivered his redacted report. His new job would be as the chief operating officer of the Prince Group, Blackwater’s parent company.

Much has been made of Erik Prince and his family’s six-digit contributions to Republican candidates and lifelong connections to religious-right power brokers like James Dobson and Gary Bauer. Mr. Prince maintains that these contacts had nothing to do with Blackwater’s growth from tiny start-up to billion-dollar federal contractor in the Bush years. But far more revealing, though far less noticed, is the pedigree of the Washington players on his payroll.

Blackwater’s lobbyist and sometime spokesman, for instance, is Paul Behrends, who first represented the company as a partner in the now-defunct Alexander Strategy Group. That firm, founded by a former Tom DeLay chief of staff, proved ground zero in the Jack Abramoff scandals. Alexander may be no more, but since then, in addition to Blackwater, Mr. Behrends’s clients have includeda company called the First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting Company, the builder of the new American embassy in Iraq.

That Vatican-sized complex is the largest American embassy in the world. Now running some $144 million over its $592 million budget and months behind schedule, the project is notorious for its deficient, unsafe construction, some of which has come under criminal investigation. First Kuwaiti has also been accused of engaging in human trafficking to supply the labor force. But the current Bush-appointed State Department inspector general — guess what — has found no evidence of any wrongdoing.

Both that inspector general, Howard Krongard, and First Kuwaiti are now in the cross hairs of Henry Waxman’s House oversight committee. Some of Mr. Krongard’s deputies have accused him of repeatedly halting or impeding investigations in a variety of fraud cases.

Representative Waxman is also trying to overcome State Department stonewalling to investigate corruption in the Iraqi government. In perverse mimicry of his American patrons, Nuri al-Maliki’s office has repeatedly tried to limit the scope of inquiries conducted by Iraq’s own Commission on Public Integrity. The judge in charge of that commission, Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, has now sought asylum in America. Thirty-one of his staff members and a dozen of their relatives have been assassinated, sometimes after being tortured.

The Waxman investigations notwithstanding, the culture of corruption, Iraq war division, remains firmly entrenched. Though some American bribe-takers have been caught — including Gloria Davis, an Army major who committed suicide in Kuwait after admitting her crimes last year — we are asked to believe they are isolated incidents. The higher reaches of the chain of command have been spared, much as they were at Abu Ghraib.

Even a turnover in administrations doesn’t guarantee reform. J. Cofer Black, the longtime C.I.A. hand who is now Blackwater’s vice chairman, has signed on as a Mitt Romney adviser. Hillary Clinton’s Karl Rove, Mark Penn, doubles as the chief executive of Burson-Marsteller, the P.R. giant whose subsidiary helped prepare Mr. Prince for his Congressional testimony. Mr. Penn said the Blackwater association was “temporary.”

War profiteering happens even in “good” wars. Arthur Miller made his name in 1947 with “All My Sons,” which ends with the suicide of a corrupt World War II contractor whose defective airplane parts cost 21 pilots their lives. But in the case of Iraq, this corruption has been at the center of the entire mission, from war-waging to nation-building. As the investigative reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele observed in the October Vanity Fair, America has to date “spent twice as much in inflation-adjusted dollars to rebuild Iraq as it did to rebuild Japan — an industrialized country three times Iraq’s size, two of whose cities had been incinerated by atomic bombs.” (And still Iraq lacks reliable electric power.)

The cost cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and money. There will be a long hangover of shame. Its essence was summed up by Col. Ted Westhusing, an Army scholar of military ethics who was an innocent witness to corruption, not a participant, when he died at age 44 of a gunshot wound to the head while working for Gen. David Petraeus training Iraqi security forces in Baghdad in 2005. He was at the time the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq.

Colonel Westhusing’s death was ruled a suicide, though some believe he was murdered by contractors fearing a whistle-blower, according to T. Christian Miller, the Los Angeles Times reporter who documents the case in his book “Blood Money.” Either way, the angry four-page letter the officer left behind for General Petraeus and his other commander, Gen. Joseph Fil, is as much an epitaph for America’s engagement in Iraq as a suicide note.

“I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars,” Colonel Westhusing wrote, abbreviating the word mission. “I am sullied.”

'A Coup Has Occurred'

2007-10-20T17:45:00.000-07:00

By Daniel Ellsberg

September 26, 2007 (Text of a speech delivered September 20, 2007) -- I think nothing has higher priority than averting an attack on Iran, which I think will be accompanied by a further change in our way of governing here that in effect will convert us into what I would call a police state.

If there’s another 9/11 under this regime … it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed, largely secretly at first but eventually leaked out and known and accepted by the Democratic people in Congress, by the Republicans and so forth.

Will there be anything left for NSA to increase its surveillance of us? … They may be to the limit of their technical capability now, or they may not. But if they’re not now they will be after another 9/11.

And I would say after the Iranian retaliation to an American attack on Iran, you will then see an increased attack on Iran – an escalation – which will be also accompanied by a total suppression of dissent in this country, including detention camps.

It’s a little hard for me to distinguish the two contingencies; they could come together. Another 9/11 or an Iranian attack in which Iran’s reaction against Israel, against our shipping, against our troops in Iraq above all, possibly in this country, will justify the full panoply of measures that have been prepared now, legitimized, and to some extent written into law. …

This is an unusual gang, even for Republicans. [But] I think that the successors to this regime are not likely to roll back the assault on the Constitution. They will take advantage of it, they will exploit it.

Will Hillary Clinton as president decide to turn off NSA after the last five years of illegal surveillance? Will she deprive her administration her ability to protect United States citizens from possible terrorism by blinding herself and deafening herself to all that NSA can provide? I don’t think so.

Unless this somehow, by a change in our political climate, of a radical change, unless this gets rolled back in the next year or two before a new administration comes in – and there’s no move to do this at this point – unless that happens I don’t see it happening under the next administration, whether Republican or Democratic.

The Next Coup

Let me simplify this and not just to be rhetorical: A coup has occurred. I woke up the other day realizing, coming out of sleep, that a coup has occurred. It’s not just a question that a coup lies ahead with the next 9/11. That’s the next coup, that completes the first.

The last five years have seen a steady assault on every fundamental of our Constitution, … what the rest of the world looked at for the last 200 years as a model and experiment to the rest of the world – in checks and balances, limited government, Bill of Rights, individual rights protected from majority infringement by the Congress, an independent judiciary, the possibility of impeachment.

There have been violations of these principles by many presidents before. Most of the specific things that Bush has done in the way of illegal surveillance and other matters were done under my boss Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War: the use of CIA, FBI, NSA against Americans.

I could go through a list going back before this century to Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War, and before that the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 18th century. I think that none of those presidents were in fact what I would call quite precisely the current administration: domestic enemies of the Constitution.

I think that none of these presidents with all their violations, which were impeachable had they been found out at the time and in nearly every case their violations were not found out until they were out of office so we didn’t have the exact challenge that we have today.

That was true with the first term of Nixon and certainly of Johnson, Kennedy and others. They were impeachable, they weren’t found out in time, but I think it was not their intention to in the crisis situations that they felt justified their actions, to change our form of government.

It is increasingly clear with each new book and each new leak that comes out, that Richard Cheney and his now chief of staff David Addington have had precisely that in mind since at least the early 70s. Not just since 1992, not since 2001, but have believed in Executive government, single-branch government under an Executive president – elected or not – with unrestrained powers. They did not believe in restraint.

When I say this I’m not saying they are traitors. I don’t think they have in mind allegiance to some foreign power or have a desire to help a foreign power. I believe they have in their own minds a love of this country and what they think is best for this country – but what they think is best is directly and consciously at odds with what the Founders of this country and Constitution thought.

They believe we need a different kind of government now, an Executive government essentially, rule by decree, which is what we’re getting with signing statements. Signing statements are talked about as line-item vetoes which is one [way] of describing them which are unconstitutional in themselves, but in other ways are just saying the president says “I decide what I enforce. I decide what the law is. I legislate.”

It’s [the same] with the military commissions, courts that are under the entire control of the Executive Branch, essentially of the president. A concentration of legislative, judicial, and executive powers in one branch, which is precisely what the Founders meant to avert, and tried to avert and did avert to the best of their ability in the Constitution.

Founders Had It Right

Now I’m appealing to that as a crisis right now not just because it is a break in tradition but because I believe in my heart and from my experience that on this point the Founders had it right.

It’s not just “our way of doing things” – it was a crucial perception on the corruption of power to anybody including Americans. On procedures and institutions that might possibly keep that power under control because the alternative was what we have just seen, wars like Vietnam, wars like Iraq, wars like the one coming.

That brings me to the second point. This Executive Branch, under specifically Bush and Cheney, despite opposition from most of the rest of the branch, even of the cabinet, clearly intends a war against Iran which even by imperialist standards, standards in other words which were accepted not only by nearly everyone in the Executive Branch but most of the leaders in Congress. The interests of the empire, the need for hegemony, our right to control and our need to control the oil of the Middle East and many other places. That is consensual in our establishment. …

But even by those standards, an attack on Iran is insane. And I say that quietly, I don’t mean it to be heard as rhetoric. Of course it’s not only aggression and a violation of international law, a supreme international crime, but it is by imperial standards, insane in terms of the consequences.

Does that make it impossible? No, it obviously doesn’t, it doesn’t even make it unlikely.

That is because two things come together that with the acceptance for various reasons of the Congress – Democrats and Republicans – and the public and the media, we have freed the White House – the president and the vice president – from virtually any restraint by Congress, courts, media, public, whatever.

And on the other hand, the people who have this unrestrained power are crazy. Not entirely, but they have crazy beliefs.

And the question is what then, what can we do about this? We are heading towards an insane operation. It is not certain. It is likely. … I want to try to be realistic myself here, to encourage us to do what we must do, what is needed to be done with the full recognition of the reality. Nothing is impossible.

What I’m talking about in the way of a police state, in the way of an attack on Iran is not certain. Nothing is certain, actually. However, I think it is probable, more likely than not, that in the next 15, 16 months of this administration we will see an attack on Iran. Probably. Whatever we do.

And … we will not succeed in moving Congress probably, and Congress probably will not stop the president from doing this. And that’s where we’re heading. That’s a very ugly, ugly prospect.

However, I think it’s up to us to work to increase that small perhaps – anyway not large – possibility and probability to avert this within the next 15 months, aside from the effort that we have to make for the rest of our lives.

Restoring the Republic

Getting back the constitutional government and improving it will take a long time. And I think if we don’t get started now, it won’t be started under the next administration.

Getting out of Iraq will take a long time. Averting Iran and averting a further coup in the face of a 9/11, another attack, is for right now, it can’t be put off. It will take a kind of political and moral courage of which we have seen very little…

We have a really unusual concentration here and in this audience, of people who have in fact changed their lives, changed their position, lost their friends to a large extent, risked and experienced being called terrible names, “traitor,” “weak on terrorism” – names that politicians will do anything to avoid being called.

How do we get more people in the government and in the public at large to change their lives now in a crisis in a critical way? How do we get Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for example? What kinds of pressures, what kinds of influences can be brought to bear to get Congress to do their jobs? It isn’t just doing their jobs. Getting them to obey their oaths of office.

I took an oath many times, an oath of office as a Marine lieutenant, as an official in the Defense Department, as an official in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer. A number of times I took an oath of office which is the same oath office taken by every member of Congress and every official in the United States and every officer in the United States armed services.

And that oath is not to a Commander in Chief, which is not mentioned. It is not to a fuehrer. It is not even to superior officers. The oath is precisely to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Now that is an oath I violated every day for years in the Defense Department without realizing it when I kept my mouth shut when I knew the public was being lied into a war as they were lied into Iraq, as they are being lied into war in Iran.

I knew that I had the documents that proved it, and I did not put it out then. I was not obeying my oath which I eventually came to do.

I’ve often said that Lt. Ehren Watada – who still faces trial for refusing to obey orders to deploy to Iraq which he correctly perceives to be an unconstitutional and aggressive war – is the single officer in the United States armed services who is taking seriously in upholding his oath.

The president is clearly violating that oath, of course. Everybody under him who understands what is going on and there are myriad, are violating their oaths. And that’s the standard that I think we should be asking of people.

Congressional Courage

On the Democratic side, on the political side, I think we should be demanding of our Democratic leaders in the House and Senate – and frankly of the Republicans – that it is not their highest single absolute priority to be reelected or to maintain a Democratic majority so that Pelosi can still be Speaker of the House and Reid can be in the Senate, or to increase that majority.

I’m not going to say that for politicians they should ignore that, or that they should do something else entirely, or that they should not worry about that.

Of course that will be and should be a major concern of theirs, but they’re acting like it’s their sole concern. Which is business as usual. “We have a majority, let’s not lose it, let’s keep it. Let’s keep those chairmanships.” Exactly what have those chairmanships done for us to save the Constitution in the last couple of years?

I am shocked by the Republicans today that I read in the Washington Post who yesterday threatened a filibuster if we … get back habeas corpus. The ruling out of habeas corpus with the help of the Democrats did not get us back to George the First it got us back to before King John 700 years ago in terms of counter-revolution.

We need some way, and Ann Wright has one way, of sitting in, in Conyers office and getting arrested. Ray McGovern has been getting arrested, pushed out the other day for saying the simple words “swear him in” when it came to testimony.

I think we’ve got to somehow get home to them [in Congress] that this is the time for them to uphold the oath, to preserve the Constitution, which is worth struggling for in part because it’s only with the power that the Constitution gives Congress responding to the public, only with that can we protect the world from mad men in power in the White House who intend an attack on Iran.

And the current generation of American generals and others who realize that this will be a catastrophe have not shown themselves – they might be people who in their past lives risked their bodies and their lives in Vietnam or elsewhere, like [Colin] Powell, and would not risk their career or their relation with the president to the slightest degree.

That has to change. And it’s the example of people like those up here who somehow brought home to our representatives that they as humans and as citizens have the power to do likewise and find in themselves the courage to protect this country and protect the world. Thank you.

Daniel Ellsberg is author of "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers".

Death of the Machine

2007-10-19T01:54:00.000-07:00

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
October 19, 2007

“There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.” So declared Mark Hanna, the great Gilded Age political boss.

Karl Rove has often described Hanna as his role model. And predictions that Mr. Rove and his disciples would succeed in creating a permanent Republican majority — I have a whole bookshelf of volumes with titles like “One Party Nation” and “Building Red America” — depended crucially on the assumption that the G.O.P. would have vastly more money than its opponents. It might even, some thought, match the 10-to-1 advantage Hanna gave William McKinley when he ran against William Jennings Bryan.

Oops. According to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, in the current election cycle every one of the top 10 industries making political donations is giving more money to Democrats. Even industries that have in the past been overwhelmingly Republican, like insurance and pharmaceuticals, are now splitting their donations more or less evenly. Oil and gas is the only major industry that the G.O.P. can still call its own.

The sudden burst of corporate affection for Democrats is good news for the party’s campaign committees, but not necessarily good news for progressives. Before I get to the down side, however, let’s talk about why business seems to be giving up on the G.O.P.

To some extent it’s a matter of cold political calculation. Polls, plus a wave of G.O.P. retirements, suggest that next year the Democrats will expand their majority in the House, which is already bigger than anything the Republicans ever had during their 12-year reign. Of the 34 Senate seats up for election, 22 are held by Republicans, and major Democratic gains seem all but inevitable.

Add to this the weakness of the Republican presidential field, and it’s not surprising that lobbyists are casting in their lot with the likely winners. But that’s not the whole story.

There’s also disgust, even in the corporate world, with the corruption and incompetence of the Bush years. People on the left often describe the Bush administration as an agent of corporate America; that’s giving it too much credit.

The truth is that while the administration has lavished favors on some powerful, established corporations, the biggest scandals have involved companies that were small or didn’t exist at all until they started getting huge contracts thanks to their political connections. Thus, Blackwater USA was a tiny business until it somehow became the leading supplier of mercenaries for the War on Terror™.

And the lethal amateurishness of these loyal Bushies on the make horrifies the corporate elite almost as much as it horrifies ordinary Americans.

Last but not least, even corporations are relieved to see the end of what amounted to a protection racket.

In a classic 2003 article in The Washington Monthly, Nicholas Confessore (now at The New York Times) described the efforts of people like former Senator Rick Santorum to turn K Street into an appendage of the Republican Party — not the other way around. “The corporate lobbyists who once ran the show, loyal only to the parochial interests of their employer,” wrote Mr. Confessore, “are being replaced by party activists who are loyal first and foremost to the G.O.P.”

But corporations weren’t happy. According to The Politico, “many C.E.O.’s” used the term “extortion” to describe “the annual shakedowns by committee chairmen with jurisdiction over their industries.” And now that Mr. Santorum is out of office, heading the America’s Enemies program at a right-wing think tank, the faint sound you hear from K Street is that of lobbyists singing: “Ding, dong, the witch is dead.”

All of this greatly increases the odds that the Republicans, far from establishing a permanent majority, will be out of power for quite a while. But it also raises the question of what Democratic rule will really mean.

Right now all the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination are running on strongly progressive platforms — especially on health care. But there remain real concerns about what they would actually do in office.

Here’s an example of the sort of thing that makes you wonder: yesterday ABC News reported on its Web site that the Clinton campaign is holding a “Rural Americans for Hillary” lunch and campaign briefing — at the offices of the Troutman Sanders Public Affairs Group, which lobbies for the agribusiness and biotech giant Monsanto. You don’t have to be a Naderite to feel uncomfortable about the implied closeness.

I’d put it this way: many progressives, myself included, hope that the next president will be another F.D.R. But we worry that he or she will turn out to be another Grover Cleveland instead — better-intentioned and much more competent than the current occupant of the White House, but too dependent on lobbyists’ money to seriously confront the excesses of our new Gilded Age.

2007-10-18T19:55:00.000-07:00

The Conscience of a Liberal: Paul Krugman

2007-10-18T19:44:00.000-07:00

October 16, 2007, 9:22 pm
Failing to Pass the Laffer Test

OK, a followup on my previous tax revenue post.

The revenue boom of the last few years, which mainly depended on booming corporate profits, is over. Here’s a chart from the Congressional Budget Office:

And a further slowdown is visible within the fiscal 2007 data: revenue in September was up only 2 percent from the previous year.

To put this in perspective, here’s revenue as a percent of GDP since Clinton took office:

So everything you’ve heard about how revenues have boomed since the Bush tax cuts is wrong. What really happened was that revenue plunged, as a percent of GDP, in the early Bush years, then staged a partial, but only partial, recovery. And that recovery seems to have run its course.

UPDATE: Aha, I forgot to point out that GDP growth has not been exceptionally strong under Bush, so that I’m not cheating by looking at revenues as a percent of GDP. Check out Figure 2 here.

Yet on the basis of this experience, both Bush and his would-be Republican successors are proclaiming that tax cuts actually increase revenue.

'No Child Left Alive'

2007-10-17T22:43:00.000-07:00

Putting Poor Children Second
Editorial
The New York Times
October 18, 2007

President Bush’s justification for vetoing a bill to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-chip, is that he wants to “put poor children first” rather than extend coverage to middle-class children. That explanation would be more believable if Mr. Bush had actually been putting poor children first. On far too many occasions, the president has sacrificed the interests of poor children to what he deems higher budgetary or ideological priorities. Congress should not allow Mr. Bush to do the same with S-chip.

For the past several years, the Bush administration has been squeezing federal support for Medicaid, the primary program to help the poorest families and their children. Instead of ensuring that more poor children receive coverage, the president is trying to close programs that find and enroll them. His budget for fiscal year 2008 seeks to eliminate funds for a “Cover the Kids” outreach program. A proposed rule change would also eliminate federal matching funds for local school personnel to do Medicaid outreach and enrollment activities.

The administration clearly wasn’t putting poor children first when it strongly supported Congressional bills that would impose new charges on needy beneficiaries — a step that could jeopardize health care for millions of poor children in coming years. The administration also proposed, unsuccessfully, to change Medicaid from an unlimited entitlement into a capped block grant that could have fallen short of needs in bad economic times.

As part of the anti-immigration hysteria, it imposed onerous new paperwork requirements, leading to declines in Medicaid enrollment by citizens in some states. The move also posed potential problems for foster children, for whom it is often difficult to get documents quickly, until Congress stepped in to exempt them.

In education, the president got off to a strong start with his No Child Left Behind Act that imposed new testing and reporting requirements to measure progress in the schools. With bipartisan support in Congress, he helped to provide a substantial increase in federal funds for the first couple of years. But then his budgets and Congressional appropriations flattened out, forcing cuts in programs targeted at low-income children. The president’s latest budget calls for an overall decrease in federal support for elementary and secondary education.

Funding for Head Start and Early Head Start, which provide health and education services to some 900,000 preschool children, has not kept up with inflation over the past five years, forcing programs to lay off teachers, reduce salaries and curtail operating hours. The president’s budget also seeks to eliminate Even Start, a program to help preschoolers and their mothers develop literacy skills.

Not all of the news is so bad. The administration has done relatively well in supporting food stamps and child nutrition programs. It has also taken commendable steps to improve the quality of care in Medicaid and S-chip, increase childhood immunization rates and help states ensure that children on Medicaid get appropriate diagnosis and treatment.

A lot more needs to be done, including reducing the number of American children who do not have health coverage.

The bill that the president has vetoed would increase funding for S-chip substantially and would, in fact, “put poor children first.” Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, a key sponsor, estimates that some 92 percent of the children who would benefit would come from families with incomes below twice the poverty level, the group the president says he wants to concentrate on.

House members should vote today to override the president’s veto. It is the best way to protect America’s low-income children.

The ‘American’ in France

2007-10-17T20:46:00.000-07:00

By ROGER COHEN
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
October 18, 2007

PARIS

Not only is Christine Lagarde France’s finance minister, ready to forsake her native tongue, she is, she says, “happier doing this in English.” With that, right off the bat, she declares in ringing Anglo-Saxon: “We are trying to change the psyche of the French people in relation to work.”

A hopeless task, some might say. Deep in the Gallic soul resides the notion that work is exploitation, a ruse concocted by American robber barons, best regulated and minimized and offset by hours of idleness. The demise of the Soviet Union left France leading the counter-capitalist school.

But Lagarde, 51, tall and striking, is not known as “the American” for nothing. Think of her as the face of a new France ditching its cold-war hangover. The sobriquet reflects her linguistic skills, her background as a highflying executive for the Baker & McKenzie law firm and her Chicago-cultivated candor.

In an interview, Lagarde says that more than two decades at a U.S. corporation taught her: “The more hours you worked, the more hours you billed, the more profit you could generate for yourself and your firm. That was the mantra.”

The equivalent mantra in the French bureaucracy might be: the fewer hours you work, the more vacation you take, the more time you have to grumble about the state of the universe and the smarter you feel, especially compared to workaholic dingbats across the Atlantic with no time for boules.

So Lagarde, appointed four months ago by President Nicolas Sarkozy, is aware that she faces a big challenge: “What was really striking to me when I came back from Chicago in 2005 was that the law on the 35-hour week had passed and been internalized by individuals and, I think, had produced disastrous effects.”

What effects? “People did not really talk about their work. They talked about their long weekends.”

Lagarde’s goal, she says, is to slash France’s chronically highly unemployment — now about 8 percent — to 5 percent by 2012 and increase the proportion of the total population in jobs to 70 percent from 63 percent. Rehabilitating work is central to this ambition.

Tax cuts, the termination of unemployment benefits for those refusing two valid job offers, later retirement, incentives for those working more than 35 hours, a slashing of the bureaucracy associated with job-seeking and improved professional training are among measures enacted or envisaged. Legislation to reverse the 35-hour week is possible.

“I think we have to go around it,” Lagarde says of the law. “To demonstrate that it’s not a holy principle and it can be modified, varied, mitigated and possibly reversed.”

Not without a fight, however. French workers are expected to take to the streets today in what will likely be one of many big strikes against the Sarkozy-Lagarde reforms. Former governments have caved as Bastille-storming specters rose.

Not this time, insists Lagarde. “We certainly have the resolve to see reforms through,” she says. “A significant majority voted in support of a reform program that was completely advocated, advertised, trumpeted.”

France, she suggests, is changing in the image of a president whose approach “is not being constrained by rules, principles, protocol, straitjackets.”

The country, long hung up in a left-bank bubble filled with quaint notions of reversing globalization, now wants “to take advantage of a globalized world, rather than be defensive.”

To which I say: hallelujah. Without a dynamic France, Europe cannot be revitalized, and a Europe in a Gallic funk is bad for everyone. If an overbearing America has been a problem, an underperforming Europe has been its complement.

Better European performance, Lagarde thinks, is linked to exchange rates. “There is a competitive disadvantage in having a strong euro versus a relatively weak yen, a deliberately weak yuan and a low dollar,” she says ahead of a G-7 meeting tomorrow.

Another problem Lagarde faces is with a potential insider trading scandal at the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, the partly state-owned parent of Airbus whose stock plunged after delays in the A-380 superjumbo jet. She insisted there had been no government wrongdoing.

Still, small shareholder losses incurred as executives cashed in, and the impression of a cozy relationship between private and state capital, will not help Lagarde in her revolutionary efforts.

This revolution, she insists, must begin in the French head. Lagarde has become the anti-Descartes by declaring the French should think less to work more.

“What has escaped my critics,” she says with a smile, “is that clearly before action, there must be thinking. But we have been splitting hairs and talking about the sex of angels for long enough. We know the solutions to all our evils. So let’s roll up our sleeves.”

Hallelujah — and as we Anglo-Saxons say vive la France!

None Dare Call It Child Care

2007-10-17T20:42:00.000-07:00

By GAIL COLLINS
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
October 18, 2007

Back during the last presidential candidate debate, Chris Matthews of MSNBC asked whether this country would ever get back to the days when a young guy could come out of high school, get an industrial job “and provide for a family with a middle-class income and his spouse wouldn’t have to work.”

Given the fact that more than two-thirds of American mothers have been working outside the home since the 1980s, Matthews could just as easily have demanded to know when we’ll get back to using manual typewriters and rotary phones.

Still, it might have been a great conversation-starter. While it’s becoming virtually impossible to support a middle-class American family on one parent’s salary, we never hear political discussion about the repercussions. In a two-hour debate that focused on job-related issues, the Republican presidential candidates managed to mention the Smoot-Hawley tariff and trade relations with Peru but not a word about child care for America’s working parents. John McCain, who was on the receiving end of Matthews’s question, chose instead to focus on the fact that “50,000 Americans now make their living off eBay,” that the tax code is “eminently unfair” and that Congress wastes too much money studying of the DNA of Montana bears.

We live in a country where quality child care is controversial. It was one of the very first issues to be swift-boated by social conservatives. In 1971, Congress actually passed a comprehensive child care bill that was vetoed by Richard Nixon. The next time the bill came up, members were flooded with mail accusing them of being anti-family communists who wanted to let kids sue their parents if they were forced to go to church. It scared the heck out of everybody.

Right now, the only parents who routinely get serious child-care assistance from the government are extremely poor mothers in welfare-to-work programs. Even for them, the waiting lists tend to be ridiculously long. In many states, once the woman actually gets a job, she loses the day care. Middle-class families get zip, even though a decent private child care program costs $12,000 a year in some parts of the country.

The National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, or Naccrra, (this is an area replete with extraordinary people organized into groups with impossible names) says that in some states the average annual price of care was larger than the entire median income of a single parent with two children. For child care workers, the average wage is $8.78 an hour. It’s one of the worst-paying career tracks in the country. A preschool teacher with a postgraduate degree and years of experience can make $30,000 a year. You need certification in this country to be a butcher, a barber or a manicurist, but only 12 states require any training to take care of children. Only three require comprehensive background checks. In Iowa, there are 591 child care programs to every one inspector. California inspects child care centers once every five years.

“You have a work force that makes $8.78 an hour. They have no training. They have not been background checked, and we’ve put them in with children who don’t have the verbal skills to even tell somebody that they’re being treated badly,” said Linda Smith, the executive director of Naccrra. “What is wrong with a country that thinks that’s O.K.?”

We aren’t going to solve the problem during this presidential contest, but it is absolutely nuts that it isn’t a topic of discussion — or even election-year pandering. The Democratic candidates for president happily come together to tell organized labor about their unquenchable desire to have a union member as secretary of labor. The Republican candidates flock to assure the National Rifle Association about their dedication to Americans’ constitutional right to carry concealed weapons in churches. But you do not see anybody racing off to romance child care advocates.

The only candidate who talks about child care all the time is Chris Dodd of Connecticut. He has been the issue’s champion of the Senate forever. People who work in the field know he’s their guy, but it’s hard to see what good it does him out on the campaign trail. “They aren’t inclined to be the kind of people who engage in the political process,” he admitted. “They don’t have the money.”

This is Hillary Clinton’s Women’s Week. On Tuesday, she gave a major speech on working mothers in New Hampshire, with stories about her struggles when Chelsea was a baby, a grab-bag of Clintonian mini-ideas (encourage telecommuting, give awards to family-friendly businesses) and a middle-sized proposal to expand family leave. Yesterday, she was in the company of some adorable 2- and 3-year-olds, speaking out for a bill on child care workers that has little chance of passage and would make almost no difference even if it did. Clinton most certainly gets it, but she wasn’t prepared to get any closer to the problems of working parents than a plan to help them stay home from work.

At least she mentioned the subject.

Talk Show: Dick Cavett Speaks Again

2007-10-17T20:29:00.000-07:00

October 17, 2007, 10:28 pm

Hey, Listen! This One’ll Kill Ya!

I have a disturbing problem with losing things. My vulnerability to loss-distress could properly be labeled not only inordinate, but neurotic.

I don’t mean the major losses like losing a friend or a family member or a limb.

With me it’s almost as bad losing small stuff. I once re-drove 140 miles of that awful dismal part of Wyoming to retrieve a glove. I drove almost that far in Nebraska to recover a T-shirt from a motel. It wasn’t even an “I Saw Graceland” or “Orgy Volunteer” T-shirt, just a plain Fruit of the Loom. But it was mine and I loved it. It was part of the stuff that is me. And part of me had been amputated.
Clearly fodder for a few sessions with one’s head-candler. (Thank you, S.J. Perelman.)

It was in this spirit that, one beautiful spring day a good many years ago, I found myself returning to Gosman’s great seafood restaurant in Montauk Harbor. I had eaten there the previous night and my fervent hope was that a waiter had found my battered but beloved Tilley hat, and that it and I would be reunited.

This was, by the by, my second Tilley hat. The first had suffered an unusual fate. It was admired by Miss Katharine Hepburn (you know, the famous actress), who asked, in front of her house on East 49th Street, “Where’d you get that hat?” “It’s a Tilley hat,” I said. She snatched it off my head and kept it.

The second hat — successfully recovered from Gosman’s — reminds me of an experience that I would have gladly missed for the world. It has, after many years, not yet lost the power to make me wince. It happened during the Ford administration.

Doubtless there is a precise and economical phrase in German meaning “the unfortunate telling of a story that one realizes too late is ill-suited to the occasion.” (My considerably rusted college German suggests, “Die zu späte und ungeeignete Realisierung von der Ungehörigkeit von eine Geschichta erzählt,” but I may be wrong.)

The restaurant’s waiters were busy setting up the sea of empty tables for the lunch crowd. Roberta Gosman, of the Gosman’s Gosmans, asked whether I had noticed their star diner. She pointed to a couple at a nearby table right on the water; a spot where cheeky gulls have snatched succulent clams and oysters from the forks of startled diners.

The pair: an older man and a nice-looking younger dark-haired woman. He was hatless and somewhat eccentrically — considering the clear and golden weather — enveloped in a black raincoat. He resembled an old sea bird of the kind one finds wounded on a beach, peering out at the horizon and awaiting life’s terminus.

I shall not protract the suspense. It was the deposed Richard M. Nixon. With him was Julie, the more Cordelia-like daughter who had stood by her luckless dad to the bitter end.

And beyond.

Finding my hat had elevated my mood to a giddy level, encroaching just a bit, perhaps, on hypomania.

I guess it was out of some dumb desire to amuse the waiters that I grabbed up two menus. Approaching the famous seated pair from behind, I piped, “Our specials today include the Yorba Linda soufflé, the Whittier College clam chowder . . .” I invented a few more fictional Nixon-related specials; you get the idea. At least I self-censored any Checkers or Watergate references.

With me now standing at his elbow, the former president looked up at me and, with the familiar Nixon gravity of tone, uttered, “Oh, yes. I thought that was you.” I wondered how, since I had been behind them, but then sometimes it’s my voice.
A word about Nixon in the flesh.

Upon finding themselves vis a vis the gentleman for the first time, most people have reported the same thing: you couldn’t take your eyes off his nose. There’s a famous photo of Nixon and Bob Hope comparing ski noses, but that’s profile — the thing that struck you most was its appalling width. As wide as your first two fingers held together. What would normally be seen as the caricaturist’s exaggeration was, in the case of the Nixon proboscis, factual reporting.

Any modicum of humor in my waiter charade had by now evaporated. And there I awkwardly stood, with nothing to say.

Something like, “Nice to see you, won’t disturb” followed by “goodbye” would have done fine. However, exhibiting some sort of self-destructive tendency, dwarfed of course by my listener’s own, I unwisely pushed on.

“I guess the last time I saw you was when you were nice enough to invite my wife and me to that wonderful evening of Shakespeare at the White House with the great actor Nicol Williamson,” I rattled on. He appeared to recall the event, if not my attendance thereat. Need I insert here that this event had been well before my later . . . um . . .troubled relations with the Nixon White House as reported previously in this space.

Despite increasing evidence that my alleged social and conversational skills were apparently on the fritz, I pressed on.

My canoe was edging ever closer to the falls.

I said to the president, “Mr. Nixon, in the reception line that night you asked me, ‘Who’s hosting your show for you tonight?’, and I told you Joe Namath.”

I did not add that upon hearing this that night, my tuxedoed president had knitted his brow in the manner of an untalented actor trying awkwardly to combine small talk with deep concern and asked, “How are his knees?”

Memory has buried how long I may have stood there like a stopped clock. I can think of any number of funny or serious answers to the unlikely question now, but not then. I think I may have managed something like, “Yes, well, better we hope . . . I guess . . . eh?” as I quickly moved along. (Since I composed the previous sentence and this one, I’ve learned that poor knee-afflicted Broadway Joe was on the official Nixon enemies list.) I gratefully slid along to Mrs. Nixon. Seeing her, what popped into my head was Mort Sahl’s hilarious onstage description of the infamous Checkers speech: “And Pat sitting in the corner behind him — knitting a flag.”

“I thought you might enjoy this particular evening,” she said cordially. I have always liked Pat Nixon and felt hellishly sorry for her. If “in sickness and in health” ever meant anything, that woman fulfilled the vow well beyond the call of duty. God knows if she had written a full-disclosure memoir of her life with him it would have gotten — and deserved — the biggest advance in the annals of publishing.

Shelved, I should think, under Abnormal Psychology. There was always that almost Mona Lisa face she put on when having to stand or sit behind him in public view, raising the right corner of her mouth ever so slightly to a degree that suggested a prelude to a smile and also, to me anyway, a hint of pain.

To me she earned sainthood as much as Mother Theresa did, the difference being that Mother T. wanted the life she got. It would be hard to say that of Mrs. Nixon.

But let us return to our awkward little trio on the dock in Montauk.

Standing there feeling as I often have on the air when a guest is less than voluble, I tried talking myself in hopes that the guest, in a competitive sense, would tire of my taking up his airtime and chime in. But the technique that worked on the air fizzled at Gosman’s.

Then I half thought of something, with emphasis on the word half. I glimpsed a possibility. “Oh, I just remembered that a funny thing happened that night. You may recall that just as we all sat watching the last minutes of Williamson’s show, a smell like paper burning wafted into the room.”

Nixon and his daughter clearly didn’t recall, and even I was still not quite sure I remembered exactly what the funny thing was and how the story ended.

I told how it smelled sort of like a small fire in a wastepaper basket and that there were a few looks of alarm but then it went away and the show ended. I went on — since no one else was talking — to say that coming up the aisle I found myself beside the great British critic and wit, Kenneth Tynan, who was doing a profile of Williamson for The New Yorker.

At that very moment I remembered how this story ended. And I would have preferred dying to going on, but hadn’t the choice.

“I asked Tynan what he made of the smell of smoke,” I said with half a voice.

“And what did he say?” the former president probed, sounding a bit like a cross-examiner. I gulped and said in a thin voice, “He said, ‘They’ve let Agnew into the library.’”

***********

There is a specially constructed booth or chamber in a lab at Harvard that is designed to be the most silent place on earth, so acoustically muffled that the occupant is often spooked by the sound of his own blood circulating.

That day, at that moment, I knew how that occupant might have felt. The quiet was crushing. Not only was there neither laughter nor smiles from my two-person audience, but the gulls seemed to have fallen silent.

In defiance of the rule that women are generally adept at saying just the right thing at an awkward moment, Julie said, “I hope your nightclub act was funnier than that.”

While I wondered how she knew I’d had a nightclub act, her infamous parent said, with a breathtakingly straight face, “Oh, I see. Book-burning.”

The three of us must have said some form of adieu.

And like a concussed fighter with no memory of being carried from the ring, I got home somehow.

from the 'Marriage Is Not a Love Affair' files

2007-10-17T19:23:00.000-07:00

“We now pronounce you Pig & Cow…!”

“And have a nice honky-donkey honeymoon in June…”

“Ooops! Honeymoon’s over…”

"Gotta watch that girl..."

Scratchpad: Wed. 17 Oct. 2007

2007-10-17T10:16:00.000-07:00

Re Bush’s SCHIP Veto

The children didn’t ask to be born. But the neo-Confederate fascist Republican Right would deny them medical care. What utter hypocrisy! Somewhere Jesus is crying.

The cost will be paid by Tobacco Taxes. It’s win-win all around. Except for the Nicotine Lobby and their Republican windbag politician dependents.

====

Perfecting Ann Coulter

... is impossible. (Who died and made her Fuehrer…?) [Thx to Stephanie Miller & Maxim magazine]

====

To my Rightwing Repooplicker fiends:

Yours is the vitriol of ignorance and fear. Never change.

====

Re Emasculation Nation

The American dwindling middle-class worker was turned into a pathetic eunuch a long time ago. Ronald Reagan held the knife while the GOP plucked the gonads. Bush and his fellow neo-Confederate Church of the South SOBs have done their worst to finish the job.

Hey! Fritz Hayek. It was your anti-democratic pro-monarchial executive, semi-feudalist corporatist Rightwing Elitism that lighted the way to the Serfdom you purportedly feared. Not progressivism, not liberalism, not socialism.

American Workers aren’t ‘French’. And that’s too bad. If they were they’d be in the streets 24 hours a day bring on the General Strike and the Mass Consumer Boycott to topple this murderous and corrupt Crapitalist economic system of wage and debt slavery. After the self-sacrificial CIO activists were purged from Organized Labor and American Life in general after WW2 and as the GOP passed Taft-Hartley (over Truman’s veto) making it more difficult for workers to organize against their exploiters, marks the beginning of the period of the decline of the power of the working-class after so many hard-fought battles. After the working-class won the world, the Masterclass came back out of their holes to start remaking the Old Failed War-Dependent World according to the same old schemes.

====

Re Randi Rhodes

If true, I’m glad I was apparently wrong about her being attacked by Bushwing thugs. However, the full story has yet to be told by Randi Rhodes herself. But given the history of the Rightwing throughout the years in this society being responsible for the significant number of political assassinations, murders, assaults and discrimination, it was not unreasonable to assume such involvement. Hey. Sometimes you just have to resort to profiling…

(Of course there’s always the possibility that Randi was given a warning to keep her mouth shut about the incident by party/parties unknown. Don‘t change that dial!)

====

Come January, Social Security pensioners will get the smallest Cost of Living increase (which hasn’t kept pace with the cost of living) in 4 years thanks to the rotten-to-the-core rightwing reactionary GOP Church of the South neo-Confederates). 2.3 %! That’s an average of something like US$24. Woop-dee-doo. So typical of the provincial parochial bible-babbling AmeriKKKornponer Jerk Ethic.

====

Bush and his Crusader minions

... are some kind of chattering war-loving money-worshipping cannibalistic monkey.

There are at least two distinctly different psychological species of Man. The Prometheans (and I’ll throw in with them) and the Epimetheans (Bush Cheney and their hideously depraved degenerated version of humanunkind).

Proof enough for Darwinian Evolution.

====

GOP distrust of Media deepens?

Good! Let it rush screaming paranoid right into the thick brick wall of their own making!

====

Hey! Ms. Angelina 'Atlas Shrugged' Jolie (& Mr. Brad Jolie...)

Aynnie Rand was a fascistic douchbag! So what does that make you?

====

Who does Bush think he is?

The President or something…?

====

Bush cuts one (in a manner of speaking):

Congress has more important things to do than attacking the Ottoman Empire.

====

Cowboys, yes. Cowboy diplomacy, no!

I’ve nothing against cowboys. I’ve worked with cowboys (although not as a cowboy). But Bush is a faux cowboy. Afraid of horses. (Terrorists?) Small-sized Stetson.

====

Bush Down, GOP Down, Dems Up!

[W]hen asked which party would better maintain prosperity, it's Democrats by 54-34 percent according to [GOP hallelujah pollster] Gallup. [ Source: Why 2008 will be a Perfect Storm for Republicans ]

So please, Mr. Numbnuts, stop reflexively blurting out that Democrats have lower approval numbers than the twice-illegitimately installed Bonezer Bush. It just is not true. (But since when has empirical reality ever influenced you folk…)

====

Re Bush announcing VA Hospital (socialized medicine) improvements.

Republicans don’t do anything good for average citizens unless they’re shamed into it.

The Dems and their allies are the ones actually doing the fighting for the troops.

====

From the Connedserfaturd Mottos Files:

There’s no need to be overly generous. We are not our brother’s keeper. Every man for himself.

----

Voice in the water: Help! Help!

Comrade Ordinary Seaman: Captain, captain! A Conservative Republican fell overboard!

Comrade Captain Red Vengeance: [Insouciantly.] Oh okay. [Shouting.] Coffee time…!

====

GOP Mess America!

====

Keep strong!

====

2007-10-16T17:51:00.000-07:00

POPE JOHN-PAUL RETURNS FROM THE DEAD TO SEE J.K. ROWLING’S PERKY LITTLE ENGLISH TITTIES

“I don’t have to be celibate anymore…Thank Satan…!”

“Hi there, Pontiff…How’s it hangin’?…See ya later…!”

“Looks like he’s burning in Hell to me…”

“Your Holiness…Did you hear the one about Old Johnny-Paulie Popey and Mrs. Harry Potter...?”

“No, Mr. President…Ah ha-ha-ha-ha-ha…”

Gore Derangement Syndrome

2007-10-15T17:41:00.000-07:00

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
October 15, 2007

On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal’s editors couldn’t even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore’s name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more.

And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with “that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance.” You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change — therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists.

What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.

But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening.

Consider the policy implications of taking climate change seriously.

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said F.D.R. “We know now that it is bad economics.” These words apply perfectly to climate change. It’s in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.

The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common good is to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right thing. In this case, people have to be given a reason to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on emissions or by requiring that they buy emission permits, which has pretty much the same effects as an emissions tax. We know that such policies work: the U.S. “cap and trade” system of emission permits on sulfur dioxide has been highly successful at reducing acid rain.

Climate change is, however, harder to deal with than acid rain, because the causes are global. The sulfuric acid in America’s lakes mainly comes from coal burned in U.S. power plants, but the carbon dioxide in America’s air comes from coal and oil burned around the planet — and a ton of coal burned in China has the same effect on the future climate as a ton of coal burned here. So dealing with climate change not only requires new taxes or their equivalent; it also requires international negotiations in which the United States will have to give as well as get.

Everything I’ve just said should be uncontroversial — but imagine the reception a Republican candidate for president would receive if he acknowledged these truths at the next debate. Today, being a good Republican means believing that taxes should always be cut, never raised. It also means believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not negotiate with them.

So if science says that we have a big problem that can’t be solved with tax cuts or bombs — well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists must be slimed. For example, Investor’s Business Daily recently declared that the prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the nefarious schemes of — who else? — George Soros.

Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. Gore: in his case the smear campaign has failed. He’s taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it drives them crazy.

2007-10-14T11:01:00.001-07:00

[Art by Alfred Russell.]

The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us

2007-10-13T19:13:00.000-07:00

By FRANK RICH
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
October 14, 2007

“BUSH lies” doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves.

Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of Justice memos countenancing torture. President Bush gave his standard response: “This government does not torture people.” Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of “torture” is. The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.

By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.”

Still, the drill remains the same. The administration gives its alibi (Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples). A few members of Congress squawk. The debate is labeled “politics.” We turn the page.

There has been scarcely more response to the similarly recurrent story of apparent war crimes committed by our contractors in Iraq. Call me cynical, but when Laura Bush spoke up last week about the human rights atrocities in Burma, it seemed less an act of selfless humanitarianism than another administration maneuver to change the subject from its own abuses.

As Mrs. Bush spoke, two women, both Armenian Christians, were gunned down in Baghdad by contractors underwritten by American taxpayers. On this matter, the White House has been silent. That incident followed the Sept. 16 massacre in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where 17 Iraqis were killed by security forces from Blackwater USA, which had already been implicated in nearly 200 other shooting incidents since 2005. There has been no accountability. The State Department, Blackwater’s sugar daddy for most of its billion dollars in contracts, won’t even share its investigative findings with the United States military and the Iraqi government, both of which have deemed the killings criminal.

The gunmen who mowed down the two Christian women worked for a Dubai-based company managed by Australians, registered in Singapore and enlisted as a subcontractor by an American contractor headquartered in North Carolina. This is a plot out of “Syriana” by way of “Chinatown.” There will be no trial. We will never find out what happened. A new bill passed by the House to regulate contractor behavior will have little effect, even if it becomes law in its current form.

We can continue to blame the Bush administration for the horrors of Iraq — and should. Paul Bremer, our post-invasion viceroy and the recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his efforts, issued the order that allows contractors to elude Iraqi law, a folly second only to his disbanding of the Iraqi Army. But we must also examine our own responsibility for the hideous acts committed in our name in a war where we have now fought longer than we did in the one that put Verschärfte Vernehmung on the map.

I have always maintained that the American public was the least culpable of the players during the run-up to Iraq. The war was sold by a brilliant and fear-fueled White House propaganda campaign designed to stampede a nation still shellshocked by 9/11. Both Congress and the press — the powerful institutions that should have provided the checks, balances and due diligence of the administration’s case — failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top.

As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin.

In April 2004, Stars and Stripes first reported that our troops were using makeshift vehicle armor fashioned out of sandbags, yet when a soldier complained to Donald Rumsfeld at a town meeting in Kuwait eight months later, he was successfully pilloried by the right. Proper armor procurement lagged for months more to come. Not until early this year, four years after the war’s first casualties, did a Washington Post investigation finally focus the country’s attention on the shoddy treatment of veterans, many of them victims of inadequate armor, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military hospitals.

We first learned of the use of contractors as mercenaries when four Blackwater employees were strung up in Falluja in March 2004, just weeks before the first torture photos emerged from Abu Ghraib. We asked few questions. When reports surfaced early this summer that our contractors in Iraq (180,000, of whom some 48,000 are believed to be security personnel) now outnumber our postsurge troop strength, we yawned. Contractor casualties and contractor-inflicted casualties are kept off the books.

It was always the White House’s plan to coax us into a blissful ignorance about the war. Part of this was achieved with the usual Bush-Cheney secretiveness, from the torture memos to the prohibition of photos of military coffins. But the administration also invited our passive complicity by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily persuaded there could be a free war.

Instead of taxing us for Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax cuts. Instead of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to finesse the overstretched military’s holes. With the war’s entire weight falling on a small voluntary force, amounting to less than 1 percent of the population, the rest of us were free to look the other way at whatever went down in Iraq.

We ignored the contractor scandal to our own peril. Ever since Falluja this auxiliary army has been a leading indicator of every element of the war’s failure: not only our inadequate troop strength but also our alienation of Iraqi hearts and minds and our rampant outsourcing to contractors rife with Bush-Cheney cronies and campaign contributors. Contractors remain a bellwether of the war’s progress today. When Blackwater was briefly suspended after the Nisour Square catastrophe, American diplomats were flatly forbidden from leaving the fortified Green Zone. So much for the surge’s great “success” in bringing security to Baghdad.

Last week Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq war combat veteran who directs Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, sketched for me the apocalypse to come. Should Baghdad implode, our contractors, not having to answer to the military chain of command, can simply “drop their guns and go home.” Vulnerable American troops could be deserted by those “who deliver their bullets and beans.”

This potential scenario is just one example of why it’s in our national self-interest to attend to Iraq policy the White House counts on us to ignore. Our national character is on the line too. The extralegal contractors are both a slap at the sovereignty of the self-governing Iraq we supposedly support and an insult to those in uniform receiving as little as one-sixth the pay. Yet it took mass death in Nisour Square to fix even our fleeting attention on this long-metastasizing cancer in our battle plan.

Similarly, it took until December 2005, two and a half years after “Mission Accomplished,” for Mr. Bush to feel sufficient public pressure to acknowledge the large number of Iraqi casualties in the war. Even now, despite his repeated declaration that “America will not abandon the Iraqi people,” he has yet to address or intervene decisively in the tragedy of four million-plus Iraqi refugees, a disproportionate number of them children. He feels no pressure from the American public to do so, but hey, he pays lip service to Darfur.

Our moral trajectory over the Bush years could not be better dramatized than it was by a reunion of an elite group of two dozen World War II veterans in Washington this month. They were participants in a top-secret operation to interrogate some 4,000 Nazi prisoners of war. Until now, they have kept silent, but America’s recent record prompted them to talk to The Washington Post.

“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, took place over a chessboard. George Frenkel, 87, recalled that he “never laid hands on anyone” in his many interrogations, adding, “I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.

Sri Chinmoy, Athletic Spiritual Leader, Dies at 76

2007-10-13T09:54:00.000-07:00

By COREY KILGANNON
Obituaries
The New York Times
October 13, 2007

Sri Chinmoy, the genial Indian-born spiritual leader who used strenuous exercise and art to spread his message of world harmony and inner peace, died Thursday at his home in Jamaica, Queens, where he ran a meditation center. He was 76.

The cause was a heart attack, said representatives of his organization, the Sri Chinmoy Center.

Mr. Chinmoy spread his philosophy through his own way of life, exercising and creating art and music. He drew attention by power-lifting pickup trucks and public figures like Muhammad Ali and Sting. He said he had drawn 16 million “peace birds.”

He slept only 90 minutes a day, he said, and when he was not traveling to perform in concerts and spread his message, spent the rest of the time meditating, playing music, exercising and making art.

His followers said he had written 1,500 books, 115,000 poems and 20,000 songs, created 200,000 paintings and had given almost 800 peace concerts.

Drawing upon Hindu principles, Mr. Chinmoy advocated a spiritual path to God through prayer and meditation. He emphasized "love, devotion and surrender" and recommended that his disciples nurture their spirituality by taking on seemingly impossible physical challenges.

“His life was all about challenging yourself and being the best you can be,” said Carl Lewis, the Olympic sprinter, a friend of Mr. Chinmoy’s. “He told his disciples to go out and meet a challenge you don’t think you can do.”

“He’s the reason I plan on running the New York marathon when I’m 50,” Mr. Lewis said in a telephone interview yesterday.

In the 1970’s, Mr. Chinmoy was a guru to several prominent musicians, including the guitarist John McLaughlin, who for a time ran the Mahavishnu Orchestra, a name given it by Mr. Chinmoy, as well as the bandleader Carlos Santana, the singer Roberta Flack and the saxophonist Clarence Clemons.

Mr. Chinmoy gathered with his disciples at a private clay tennis court off 164th Street that doubled as a verdant meditation site known as Aspiration Ground. He built a worldwide network of meditation centers and had more than 7,000 disciples.

Yesterday at the compound, Mr. Chinmoy’s followers — dressed in their traditional white attire — lined up at an altar where he lay in an open coffin. Memorial services are planned throughout the weekend.

Sri Chinmoy Kumar Ghose was born a Hindu in 1931 in what is now Bangladesh. From the age of 12, he lived in an ashram. He said he idolized the track star Jesse Owens.

Mr. Chinmoy immigrated to New York in 1964 to work as a clerk at the Indian Consulate. He opened a meditation center in Queens with a philosophy of celibacy, vegetarianism and meditation and attracted hundreds of followers, many settling near his two-story home on 149th Street.

To achieve spiritual enlightenment, he advocated extreme physical activity, including weight lifting, distance running and swimming.

Disciples put his philosophy of self-transcendence into practice by undertaking challenges like swimming the English Channel or running ultra-marathons, including an annual 3,100-mile race run every year over a two-month period in Queens.

After a knee injury ended his own running, in his 60s, Mr. Chinmoy began lifting weights and within several years could shoulder-press more than 7,000 pounds on a special lifting apparatus. He publicly lifted heavy objects including airplanes, schoolhouses and pickup trucks, to help increase awareness of the need for humanitarian aid.

He also lifted more than 8,000 people since 1988, including world peace figures like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. He hoisted the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Eddie Murphy, Susan Sarandon, Yoko Ono and Richard Gere. Mr. Chinmoy lifted 20 Nobel laureates and a team of sumo wrestlers. He lifted Sid Caesar and a (reformed) headhunter from Borneo, and picked up Representative Gary L. Ackerman, a Democrat, and Representative Benjamin Gilman, a Republican at the same time.

“I thought it was some magician’s trick, but it wasn’t,” Mr. Ackerman said yesterday. “He was running extreme marathons before people even knew what extreme sports were. When you were around him, you had the sudden realization you were in the presence of somebody very, very holy and very devout.”

Yesterday, hundreds of his disciples gathered at the tennis court. Many, like Mr. Lewis, had flown in from places around the world. There were condolence letters faxed from world figures, including former Vice President Al Gore and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, who met and corresponded with Mr. Chinmoy frequently.

Mr. Gorbachev wrote that Mr. Chinmoy’s passing was “a loss for the whole world” and that “in our hearts, he will forever remain a man who dedicated his whole life to peace.”