HEALTH : The Homeopathic Crowd Meets Academic Medicine

Posted on August 21, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Echinacea purpurea: Academic studies say it doesn’t work.

‘To dismiss alternative medicine too quickly is to miss a central question: What is the role of health care?’
By Kent Sepkowitz

Few things rankle doctors more than alternative (aka complementary, integrative, holistic, homeopathic, naturopathic) medicine. First came the misery inflicted by the ever-expanding celebrity of practitioners like Andrew Weil and Gary Null (and, for a while, even Radovan Karadzic). And now there is the arrival at the NIH feeding trough of the alternative medicine crowd, angling for a mouthful of the same research dollars that currently fund investigations like “the structural basis for translation termination on the 70S ribosome.”

Though initially caught flat-footed, academic medicine rallied, as it always does when big bucks are on offer. After decades of belittling the alternative folk as a bunch of snake-oil salesmen and sleazeballs, academic medical centers suddenly realized that—guess what—they were big fans of the approach all along. Yale University is one of the latest brand-name institutions to go through the change. Last year, it joined 40 other medical schools in the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine, and began the awkward dance that has characterized such mergers.

Viewed one way, the migration of alternative medicine to the academic mainstream is a fine example of the might of popular will. After all, a 2004 survey revealed that 36 percent of adults in the United States have used alternative medicine at one time or another. If megavitamins and prayer are included, the proportion rises to 62 percent.

A darker view, though, is held by hard-core old-schoolers. Some of their objections are hyperventilation: They massage people! To make theme feel better! More seriously, they cast the encroachment of alternative medicine onto academic turf as a threat to American health because it’s diverting money for research and care from traditional approaches. For the last six years, alternative medicine has received about 1 percent of the $28 billion annual NIH budget, or $300 million a year. That’s the same amount that efforts to combat stroke, improve food safety, and further develop gene therapy each receive. A Brit, lamenting a similar resource shift in his country, has equated this to murder, writing that had money “spent on refurbishing the Royal Homeopathic hospital” been used instead for effective though expensive drugs to treat breast cancer, hundreds of lives a year would be saved.

Who should prevail in this struggle between naturalistic healers and ass-kickers with syringes full of chemotherapy? In a sense, neither side. Both have much to offer and plenty to be embarrassed about. To date, neither has established an all-encompassing operation so wondrous that it should demand monogamy from patients. So far, though, the problem with pairing the two disciplines at your corner medical center is that it mostly serves to diminish each: The West looks spent and flabby, a bully gone to seed, while the East seems like a kid with a new car and no clue how to drive.

The enforcers of the Western orthodoxy are the preening evidenced-based medicine crowd, those notorious killjoys who operate on the almost amusing premise that every square inch of medicine is built upon reason, the product of a rationally ordered stainless-steel world. If no evidence, they insist, then no truth. And if no truth, get thee out of my medical center. They briskly have swept away the entire alternative field, viewing chelation, St. John’s wort, and music therapy, for example, as interchangeably absurd.

But to consider the issue more closely, we have to define alternative medicine with greater care. A 2004 government report divided the field into four big pieces: 1) biologically based practices, including herbs, special diets, and megavitamins; 2) energy medicine, which embraces the concept of magnetic fields; 3) manipulative and body-based practices such as massage and yoga; and 4) mind-body medicine, including prayer and meditation.

Costly attempts to demonstrate efficacy, paid for with taxpayer dollars, have been launched in each of the four areas. To date, as recently detailed, the results have been awful. Take the example of echinacea, an herb used by 40 percent of all natural product gobblers, who take it to ameliorate the symptoms of the common cold. Echinacea was rushed into numerous clinical trials. The result: The research shows that it doesn’t work. Or even sort of work.

Rather than admit that they’re discouraged or embarrassed by this cold, hard evidence, the alterna-crowd has claimed (OK, whined) that academic-type studies by definition are stacked against them. They consider the bedrock of Western medicine—the randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind clinical trial—too hard-edged and difficult to implement, just the sort of cruel-hearted gaming of people and disease that so characterizes most things Western. With echinacea and other botanicals, they make the additional complaint that the various trials used the wrong preparation of the magic herb. This problem is indeed critical and slows the pace of assessing various alternative remedies. Unlike standard pharmaceuticals, the production of which is fiercely regulated (another example of the sharp-elbowed West), production of echinacea and its cousins is more laid back. This helps the producer who can sell his wares with little interference, but it’s a bit of a nightmare when it comes to mounting a costly clinical trial. If one guy’s preparation does or doesn’t work, does that mean another echinacea will or won’t work, too? The looseness of the alternative approach is part of its appeal—but also hinders it from finding sure footing in the academic realm.

At the same time, to dismiss alternative medicine too quickly is to miss a central question: What is the role of health care? Is the enterprise aimed only at preventing and treating illness, or should it also try to make us feel better? Treating an illness Western-style can mean chopping off a leg, giving chemotherapy, hooking someone up to dialysis. All of this is done to score the touchdown of American medicine: extension of survival by a week, a month, a year, anything. No doctor wants a patient to suffer, but in the Western view the long-term goal of survival comes first. The focus of many Eastern approaches, on the other hand, is on feeling better now rather than lasting longer. And this is something altogether different.

The two goals—treatment and prevention on the one hand and making patients feel better on the other—really are often at odds. And in the future, they surely will diverge further as Western medicine becomes even more technologically sophisticated. A treatment with stem-cell or gene therapy isn’t going to be like drinking a glass of orange juice in the morning. The disruption and discomfort the therapies likely will inflict may make today’s medicine seem mild. The best response to the über-tech may be an equal and opposite move toward the more benign alternative realm.

Alternative medicine needs money and many years to find its way, and despite the early setbacks for echinacea and other treatments, it would be a mistake to call off the federal investment. Such an absolutist stance ignores the observations of thousands of people over thousands of years as well as the true pace of medical progress, which is at best herky-jerky and aimless. That’s not to say that alternative medicine is the equal of Western medicine, or will prove to be, many millions of research funds later. As Steve Jobs discovered, a special organic diet will not cure pancreatic cancer, whereas a six-hour surgery might. As brutal as Western medicine is, it remains a wonder of the modern world. So let’s hope that the two sides can find room for each other: The West needs the East’s soothing calm to round out its prickliness, while the East needs the West’s thuggish urge to push ahead and prove results. I think that’s called yin and yang.

Source / Slate / Posted August 13, 2008

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

BOOKS : Jim Hightower Raising Hell

Posted on August 21, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


‘Texas has produced some of the most arresting progressive voices of the last generation. Working against the state’s Rightward flow, they have harkened to its populist tradition’
By Jonathan Rowe / August 20, 2008

There is something to be said for writing in a hostile political environment. You can’t coast on prevailing opinion. You have to use your wits.

This is one reason Texas has produced some of the most arresting progressive voices of the last generation. Working against the state’s Rightward flow, they have harkened to its populist tradition. They are funny and a little outrageous. They have swagger, and tell stories.

The late Molly Ivins was an exemplar. So too is Jim Hightower, who followed Ivins at the Texas Observer (what a run) and like her is a high-spirited practitioner of the art of givin’ em hell.

Hightower grew up in Texas. He served two terms as the elected state commissioner of agriculture. (He was unseated in a campaign run by Karl Rove.) Now he’s a radio commentator and syndicated columnist, with a knack for the backcountry zingers that cut the big shots down to size. “If ignorance ever goes over forty dollars a barrel,” he has said, “I want drilling rights to George Bush’s head.”

Most of Hightower’s work has aimed at corporate miscreants and their enablers in high places. Now, in Swim Against the Current, he’s writing (with his partner Susan DeMarco) about Americans who are bucking the system and making a difference.

Reader’s Digest is the nation’s number two publication (after the AARP magazine) for a reason. We like stories about people who overcome adversity, and who don’t wait for government help. Ronald Reagan understood this. Hightower does too, though from a different standpoint.

In Swim, he and DeMarco show that self-help can be about “we” as well as “me.” They tell the story of Chris Johnson, for example, a young pharmacist in Johnson, Texas, who left a lucrative job at a chain pharmacy to start his own that sells low cost meds to people without insurance. “I knew how much the drugs really cost us and that the profit margins were obscene,” he says. “Now I’m back doing what I went into pharmacy to do—helping people.”

There’s not much policy talk here, and no lists of what the next president should do. Instead, we meet ordinary (in a sense) people like Johnson who are trying to live their values and make a difference. Another example is Organic Valley, a farmers’ co-op in Wisconsin that refused to bow to Wal-Mart’s price demands and lived to tell about it. Another is the Union Cab Company in Madison, Wisconsin, created by former drivers for the anti-union Checker Cab.

Hightower understands the difference between authentic enterprise and corporate elephantiasis. He also understands the kinship between the entrepreneur—especially the socially motivated one—and raucous, Alinsky-style community action. ACORN members in Gary, Indiana, for example, brought a greedy utility company to heel by lining up to pay their bills in pennies. They are bucking the system, much as Chris Johnson is.

Most of the stories in Swim suggest clip files rather than on-the-ground reporting. Still, I was glad to learn about these people. The inspirational mode does pose a problem for Hightower, though: how to get off the zingers at the bad guys when he’s talking about the good ones.

His solution is frequent resort to straw men, in the form of unnamed pundits, experts, and corporadoes who serve as polemical foils. The device becomes formulaic; he’d do better to tell his stories straight. More significant is the tendency to gloss over difficulties. We need inspiration, yes. But we also need to learn how people deal with setbacks. The Organic Valley co-op almost fell apart, for example. Hightower mentions this but doesn’t dig into it. Yet it’s the part we most need to understand if we are going to try to follow their example.

Then there’s Whole Foods. It’s an easy target. I’d prefer a world of independent local merchants, too. But the chain really has brought critical mass to organics, and not just on behalf of factory farms. In his discussion of Organic Valley, Hightower lets drop that one of the co-op’s major customers is … yes, Whole Foods. What are we to make of that?

Finally, I wish that Hightower had been more willing to ask his readers to look into the mirror. He has a long section, for example, on evangelical environmentalists, in particular Reverend Rich Cizik of the Evangelical Environmental Network. Hightower is right to challenge those on the Left who dismiss Christian activists out of hand. The tone is admiring and respectful.

But there is a self-satisfaction too, that someone such as Cizik has seen the environmental light. Does Cizik have a light that we need to see as well? Do the fellowship of the churches, the spiritual depth of the gospel text, the call to service rather than convenience, offer something that secular environmentalists could learn from? Discomfort is the nerve ending of growth. While we give the corporadoes hell, maybe we need to cultivate a little for ourselves.

[Jonathan Rowe wrote this review as part of A Just Foreign Policy, the Summer 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Jonathan Rowe is a YES! contributing editor, a fellow at the Tomales Bay Institute, and co-director of West Marin Commons.]

Source / YES Magazine

Find Swim Against the Current at Amazon.com.

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Gilding the Lilly : The Lies of Cindy McCain

Posted on August 21, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

On the stump: Cindy McCain speaks to reporters in Birmingham, Mich. Her arm was sprained when an enthusiastic supporter vigorously shook her hand. Photo by Mary Altaffer / AP.

Mother Teresa told me to do it…
By Alexandra Marks / August 20, 2008

Gilding the lily is nothing new to politics. From the 1840s when William Henry Harrison claimed to have been born in a log cabin (it was actually a Virginia plantation) to Ronald Reagan’s reminiscing about flying over Germany in World War II (he did, but only in a movie), politicians have taken perfectly good stories and embellished them.

This campaign is no exception. During the primaries, Hillary Rodham Clinton had to back away from claims she “ducked sniper fire” in Bosnia in 1996. Mitt Romney found himself having to explain how he “saw my father march with Martin Luther King,” when it turned out his father never marched with the Rev. Mr. King.

The latest embellishments come from the McCain camp. Cindy McCain has repeatedly referred to herself as an “only child.” This week came news that she actually has two half sisters, although apparently she had very little contact with them.

The McCain campaign had also put out the story that Mother Teresa “convinced” Cindy to bring home two orphans from Bangladesh in 1991.

Mrs. McCain, it turns out, never met Mother Teresa on that trip. (Once contacted by the Monitor, the campaign revised the story on its website.)

Such exaggerations may simply be the product of a faulty memory or a desire to be “better” than one is in a political culture that requires larger-than-life idols. But with the advent of the fact-checking obsessed blogosphere – and a media racing to keep up – such self-aggrandizement doesn’t last as long as it once did.

“It’s all about myth-making,” says Darrell West, the director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Politicians love to turn their stories into great epics, and sometimes they have to embellish to smooth out the story line.”

“But now there are too many professional and amateur fact-checkers,” he says. “And there are hundreds if not thousands of bloggers who have detailed knowledge on specialized information, so you really can’t get away with stretching the truth anymore.”

The story about Mother Teresa “convincing” Mrs. McCain to bring home two children from an orphanage in Bangladesh has been retold many times. Initially, the “About Cindy McCain” page on the McCain campaign website read: “Mother Teresa convinced Cindy to take two babies in need of medical attention to the United States. One of those babies is now their adopted daughter, 16-year-old Bridget McCain.”

The media picked up the theme. A story earlier this year on ABC’s “Good Morning America” stated, “With Mother Teresa’s encouragement she brought her fourth child, Bridget, home.” An April 2008 Wall Street Journal profile states that Mother Teresa “implored” Cindy to bring the girls to the United States. Other articles say Cindy did it “at the behest” of Mother Teresa.

But a source who was with McCain on that 1991 trip, and who asked that his name not be used because of prior legal dealings with the McCain family, says that Mother Teresa was not at the orphanage when Cindy decided to bring the two girls home.

A 1991 article in the Arizona Star at the time of the adoption only mentions that the children were from an orphanage that was started by Mother Teresa. It does not mention a meeting with Mother Teresa or her asking McCain to bring the girls to the US.

According to biographies of Mother Teresa, in 1991 she was in Mexico where she developed medical problems. From there, she went to a hospital in La Jolla, Calif.

A McCain source acknowledged that Cindy McCain did not meet Mother Teresa during the 1991 trip to Bangladesh but said McCain did meet her later on, although the source could not say when or where. The campaign has since reworded the reference to the adoption on its website.

In another instance, McCain told the Chicago Tribune earlier this year that on one of her medical missions to Vietnam she was in “the very hospital – and in the very room – where her husband was brought after being shot down and then beaten by a mob during the war.”

A 1992 Washington Times story recounts a different version: “Mrs. McCain asked to see the operating room and her husband’s cell, but was turned down. She took the rejection philosophically. ‘It’s 27 years later. Let’s go on,’ Mrs. McCain said.”

The McCain campaign again declined to comment on the discrepancy.

On background, a source close to Mrs. McCain confirmed that she was denied entry. But, the source added: “At some point thereafter, she toured the hospital and did coincidentally end up in the senator’s room.”

“Everybody tells white lies, but in the political world it’s a little different because it raises the question that if people lie about little things, are they also going to lie about big stuff that really matters?” says Mr. West.

Misremembering and stretching the truth is without doubt a bipartisan phenomenon. Twenty years ago, Sen. Joe Biden (D) of Delaware’s presidential campaign faltered when it was learned that he had lifted passages from a speech by then-British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock and that he’d also said he’d done better in law school than he actually had.

Earlier this year, Barack Obama’s campaign admitted that he overstated his father’s connection to the Kennedy family.

In speeches, Obama had said the Kennedy family provided funding for the 1959 airlift that brought his father from Kenya to the United States for an education. But according to research done by The Washington Post, the Kennedy clan didn’t contribute to the airlift efforts until 1960, a year after his father was already studying in Hawaii. When The Washington Post brought the discrepancy to the attention of the Obama campaign it readily acknowledged there was a mistake.

“You always have to look for a pattern,” says political analyst Larry Sabato, at the University of Virginia. “If it happens once, you can say it’s a memory problem, but if there’s a pattern there, there’s a problem.”

Source / Christian Science Monitor

And that’s not all: The ‘only child’ myth

When Cindy McCain talks about growing up, she usually refers to herself as an “only child” — a phrase that ignores the existence of her half sisters.

“It’s terribly painful,” Kathleen Hensley Portalski said yesterday. “It is as if she is the ‘real’ daughter. I am also a real daughter.”

Sibling Revelation: An Overlooked Branch of Cindy McCain’s Family Tree / Washington Post / August 20, 2008

Also see Made Men: How Cindy Hensley invented John McCain. / New Republic / August 20, 2008

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Joe Lieberman : Associated Press Gets One Right!

Posted on August 21, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Joe Lieberman and friend.

This typo tells the tale…
By Greg Sargent / August 19, 2008

Whoopsie! Check out this inadvertent description of Joe Lieberman in an Associated Press story on the Veepstakes…

His top contenders are said to include Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Less traditional choices mentioned include former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, an abortion-rights supporter, and Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Democratic vice presidential prick in 2000 who now is an independent.

A stopped clock is right twice a day and all that…

Source / TPM Election Central

[Note: The link to this AP story tells us it’s “no longer available.”]

Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

We Just Buy the Leaders with Money

Posted on August 21, 2008 by RagBlog


Are You Ready For Nuclear War?
By Paul Craig Roberts / August 19, 2008

Pervez Musharraf, the puppet installed by the US to rule Pakistan in the interest of US hegemony, resigned August 18 to avoid impeachment. Karl Rove and the Diebold electronic voting machines were unable to control the result of the last election in Pakistan, the result of which gave Pakistanis a bigger voice in their government than America’s.

It was obvious to anyone with any sense–which excludes the entire Bush Regime and almost all of the “foreign policy community”–that the illegal and gratuitous US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and Israel’s 2006 bombing of Lebanon civilians with US blessing, would result in the overthrow of America’s Pakistani puppet.

The imbecilic Bush Regime ensured Musharraf’s overthrow by pressuring their puppet to conduct military operations against tribesmen in Pakistani border areas, whose loyalties were to fellow Muslims and not to American hegemony. When Musharraf’s military operations didn’t produce the desired result, the idiotic Americans began conducting their own military operations within Pakistan with bombs and missiles. This finished off Musharraf.

When the Bush Regime began its wars in the Middle East, I predicted, correctly, that Musharraf would be one victim. The American puppets in Egypt and Jordan may be the next to go.

Back during the Nixon years, my Ph.D. dissertation chairman, Warren Nutter, was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. One day in his Pentagon office I asked him how the US government got foreign governments to do what the US wanted. “Money,” he replied.

“You mean foreign aid?” I asked.

“No,” he replied, “we just buy the leaders with money.”

It wasn’t a policy he had implemented. He inherited it and, although the policy rankled with him, he could do nothing about it. Nutter believed in persuasion and that if you could not persuade people, you did not have a policy.

Nutter did not mean merely third world potentates were bought. He meant the leaders of England, France, Germany, Italy, all the allies everywhere were bought and paid for.

They were allies because they were paid. Consider Tony Blair. Blair’s own head of British intelligence told him that the Americans were fabricating the evidence to justify their already planned attack on Iraq. This was fine with Blair, and you can see why with his multi- million dollar payoff once he was out of office.

The American-educated thug, Saakashkvili the War Criminal, who is president of Georgia, was installed by the US taxpayer funded National Endowment for Democracy, a neocon operation whose purpose is to ring Russia with US military bases, so that America can exert hegemony over Russia.

Every agreement that President Reagan made with Mikhail Gorbachev has been broken by Reagan’s successors. Reagan’s was the last American government whose foreign policy was not made by the Isreali-allied neoconservatives. During the Reagan years, the neocons made several runs at it, but each ended in disaster for Reagan, and he eventually drove the modern day French Jacobins from his government.

Even the anti-Soviet Committee on the Present Danger regarded the neocons as dangerous lunatics. I remember the meeting when a member tried to bring the neocons into the committee, and old line American establishment representatives, such as former Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon, hit the roof.

The Committee on the Present Danger regarded the neocons as crazy people who would get America into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The neocons hated President Reagan, because he ended the cold war with diplomacy, when they desired a military victory over the Soviet Union.

Deprived of this, the neocons now want victory over Russia.

Today, Reagan is gone. The Republican Establishment is gone. There are no conservative power centers, only neoconservative power centers closely allied with Israel, which uses the billions of dollars funneled into Israeli coffers by US taxpayers to influence US elections and foreign policy.

The Republican candidate for president is a warmonger. There are no checks remaining in the Republican Party on the neocons’ proclivity for war. What Republican constituencies oppose war? Can anyone name one?

The Democrats are not much better, but they have some constituencies that are not enamored of war in order to establish US world hegemony. The Rapture Evangelicals, who fervently desire Armageddon, are not Democrats; nor are the brainwashed Brownshirts desperate to vent their frustrations by striking at someone, somewhere, anywhere.

I get emails from these Brownshirts and attest that their hate-filled ignorance is extraordinary. They are all Republicans, and yet they think they are conservatives. They have no idea who I am, but since I criticize the Bush Regime and America’s belligerent foreign policy, they think I am a “liberal commie pinko.”

The only literate sentence this legion of imbeciles has ever managed is: “If you hate America so much, why don’t you move to Cuba!”

Such is the current state of a Reagan political appointee in today’s Republican Party. He is a “liberal commie pinko” who should move to Cuba.

The Republicans will get us into more wars. Indeed, they live for war. McCain is preaching war for 100 years. For these warmongers, it is like cheering for your home team. Win at all costs. They get a vicarious pleasure out of war. If the US has to tell lies in order to attack countries, what’s wrong with that? “If we don’t kill them over there, they will kill us over here.”

The mindlessness is total.

Nothing real issues from the American media. The media is about demonizing Russia and Iran, about the vice presidential choices as if it matters, about whether Obama being on vacation let McCain score too many points.

The mindlessness of the news reflects the mindlessness of the government, for which it is a spokesperson.

The American media does not serve American democracy or American interests. It serves the few people who exercise power.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the US and Israel made a run at controlling Russia and the former constituent parts of its empire. For awhile the US and Israel succeeded, but Putin put a stop to it.

Recognizing that the US had no intention of keeping any of the agreements it had made with Gorbachev, Putin directed the Russian military budget to upgrading the Russian nuclear deterrent. Consequently, the Russian army and air force lack the smart weapons and electronics of the US military.

When the Russian army went into Georgia to rescue the Russians in South Ossetia from the destruction being inflicted upon them by the American puppet Saakashvili, the Russians made it clear that if they were opposed by American troops with smart weapons, they would deal with the threat with tactical nuclear weapons.

The Americans were the first to announce preemptive nuclear attack as their permissible war doctrine. Now the Russians have announced the tactical use of nuclear weapons as their response to American smart weapons.

It is obvious that American foreign policy, with is goal of ringing Russia with US military bases, is leading directly to nuclear war. Every American needs to realize this fact. The US government’s insane hegemonic foreign policy is a direct threat to life on the planet.

Russia has made no threats against America. The post-Soviet Russian government has sought to cooperate with the US and Europe. Russia has made it clear over and over that it is prepared to obey international law and treaties. It is the Americans who have thrown international law and treaties into the trash can, not the Russians.

In order to keep the billions of dollars in profits flowing to its contributors in the US military-security complex, the Bush Regime has rekindled the cold war. As American living standards decline and the prospects for university graduates deteriorate, “our” leaders in Washington commit us to a hundred years of war.

If you desire to be poor, oppressed, and eventually vaporized in a nuclear war, vote Republican.

Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is a former Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, a 16-year columnist for Business Week, and a columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service and Creator’s Syndicate in Los Angeles. He has held numerous university professorships, including the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by the President of France and the US Treasury’s Silver Medal for “outstanding contributions to the formulation of US economic policy.”

Source / Information Clearing House

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Jack Cafferty : Is McCain Another George W. Bush?

Posted on August 21, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Jack Cafferty says John McCain shows virtually no intellectual curiosity, emulating President Bush.

‘It occurs to me that John McCain is as intellectually shallow as our current president’
By Jack Cafferty / August 19, 2008

NEW YORK — Russia invades Georgia and President Bush goes on vacation. Our president has spent one-third of his entire two terms in office either at Camp David, Maryland, or at Crawford, Texas, on vacation.

His time away from the Oval Office included the month leading up to 9/11, when there were signs Osama bin Laden was planning to attack America, and the time Hurricane Katrina destroyed the city of New Orleans.

Sen. John McCain takes weekends off and limits his campaign events to one a day. He made an exception for the religious forum on Saturday at Saddleback Church in Southern California.

I think he made a big mistake. When he was invited last spring to attend a discussion of the role of faith in his life with Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, McCain didn’t bother to show up. Now I know why.

It occurs to me that John McCain is as intellectually shallow as our current president. When asked what his Christian faith means to him, his answer was a one-liner. “It means I’m saved and forgiven.” Great scholars have wrestled with the meaning of faith for centuries. McCain then retold a story we’ve all heard a hundred times about a guard in Vietnam drawing a cross in the sand.

Asked about his greatest moral failure, he cited his first marriage, which ended in divorce. While saying it was his greatest moral failing, he offered nothing in the way of explanation. Why not?

Throughout the evening, McCain chose to recite portions of his stump speech as answers to the questions he was being asked. Why? He has lived 71 years. Surely he has some thoughts on what it all means that go beyond canned answers culled from the same speech he delivers every day.

He was asked “if evil exists.” His response was to repeat for the umpteenth time that Osama bin Laden is a bad man and he will pursue him to “the gates of hell.” That was it.

He was asked to define rich. After trying to dodge the question — his wife is worth a reported $100 million — he finally said he thought an income of $5 million was rich.

One after another, McCain’s answers were shallow, simplistic, and trite. He showed the same intellectual curiosity that George Bush has — virtually none.

Where are John McCain’s writings exploring the vexing moral issues of our time? Where are his position papers setting forth his careful consideration of foreign policy, the welfare state, education, America’s moral responsibility in the world, etc., etc., etc.?

John McCain graduated 894th in a class of 899 at the Naval Academy at Annapolis. His father and grandfather were four star admirals in the Navy. Some have suggested that might have played a role in McCain being admitted. His academic record was awful. And it shows over and over again whenever McCain is called upon to think on his feet.

He no longer allows reporters unfettered access to him aboard the “Straight Talk Express” for a reason. He simply makes too many mistakes. Unless he’s reciting talking points or reading from notes or a TelePrompTer, John McCain is lost. He can drop bon mots at a bowling alley or diner — short glib responses that get a chuckle, but beyond that McCain gets in over his head very quickly.

I am sick and tired of the president of the United States embarrassing me. The world we live in is too complex to entrust it to someone else whose idea of intellectual curiosity and grasp of foreign policy issues is to tell us he can look into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and see into his soul.

George Bush’s record as a student, military man, businessman and leader of the free world is one of constant failure. And the part that troubles me most is he seems content with himself.

He will leave office with the country $10 trillion in debt, fighting two wars, our international reputation in shambles, our government cloaked in secrecy and suspicion that his entire presidency has been a litany of broken laws and promises, our citizens’ faith in our own country ripped to shreds. Yet Bush goes bumbling along, grinning and spewing moronic one-liners, as though nobody understands what a colossal failure he has been.

I fear to the depth of my being that John McCain is just like him.

Jack Cafferty is the author of the best-seller “It’s Getting Ugly Out There: The Frauds, Bunglers, Liars, and Losers Who Are Hurting America.” He provides commentary on CNN’s “The Situation Room” daily from 4 p.m.-7 p.m. You can also visit Jack’s Cafferty File blog.

Source / CNN

Thanks to Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Rachel Maddow’s Star Continues to Rise; Hosts New Show on MSNBC

Posted on August 21, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Air America star Rachel Maddow gets own show on MSNBC.

Openly gay Rhodes scholar brings smarts and humor to cable news
By Howard Kurtz / August 20, 2008

Rachel Maddow has been sounding off about politics on MSNBC so often she might as well have her own show.

And now she does.

The liberal commentator and Air America radio host, who has become a breakout star for the cable channel during the presidential campaign, is taking over the 9 p.m. slot following Keith Olbermann, whom she often subs for on “Countdown.” Olbermann broke what he called a “fully authorized leak” yesterday on the left-wing Web site Daily Kos. Dan Abrams, the former MSNBC general manager who had been hosting “Verdict” at that hour, will continue as NBC’s chief legal correspondent, become a “Dateline” contributor and serve as a daytime anchor for MSNBC.

With the promotion — “The Rachel Maddow Show” begins Sept. 8 — the 35-year-old commentator breaks into what has sometimes been derided as a boys club at the network, led by Olbermann and Chris Matthews. Hillary Clinton’s campaign frequently ripped MSNBC for what it called sexist coverage during the Democratic primaries. Maddow, who lives with her girlfriend Susan Mikula in Manhattan and Northampton, Mass., may also be the first openly gay woman to host a prime-time news program.

Her appointment is certain to draw criticism that MSNBC is moving further left in an attempt to compete with Fox News from the opposite end of the spectrum. John McCain’s Republican campaign has repeatedly assailed the network’s campaign coverage as biased.

Maddow, who leavens her barbs with humor, is something of a heroine on the left. New York magazine recently ran an item headlined “Why We’re Gay for Rachel Maddow,” and a Nation article said: “Maddow didn’t get here by bluster and bravado but with a combination of crisp thinking and galumphing good cheer. Remarkably, this season’s discovery isn’t a glossy matinee idol or a smooth-talking partisan hack but a PhD Rhodes scholar lesbian policy wonk who started as a prison AIDS activist.”

Source / Washington Post

[Rachel Maddow] turned heads at MSNBC when she served as a fill-in host for Olbermann for the first time.

“By that point, we knew she was smart, articulate, just made for television,” said Griffin. Maddow clinched her solo hosting gig after she spent a full week subbing for Olbermann in July while he was pressing the flesh at the Television Critics Assn. press tour in BevHills, Griffin was sold ealed the deal.

“I was sold after that week,” Griffin said. “I knew she would get a show someday; I didn’t think it would be this quick. But Keith’s audience really connects with her.”

Cynthia Littleton / Variety / August 19, 2008

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Court Gives Green Light to "Boobs on Bikes" Parade

Posted on August 20, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Boobs on Bikes Parade, 2007. Photo by Craig Sydney.

A note on the following post. Besides the fact that it’s entertaining news, we believe there to be a substantial civil liberties issue involved here and I, for one, consider erotica to be a legitimate form of protected expression.

Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / August 20, 2008

Parade, part of Erotica Expo, features leather-clad porn stars
By David Fox / August 19, 2008

WELLINGTON — A New Zealand court has allowed a parade of topless porn stars on motor bikes to proceed on the main street of the country’s biggest city, local media said Tuesday.

Auckland City Council had sought a court injunction to stop the “Boobs on Bikes” parade, scheduled for Wednesday, saying it breached a bylaw banning offensive public events.

But Judge Nicola Mathers said while opponents may find the parade offensive or tasteless, the fact that 80,000 people had gathered for a similar event last year meant a significant number of people did not agree with the critics, New Zealand Press Association said.

The parade on Queens St., featuring leather-clad local and international porn stars, is part of an “Erotica Expo” organized by self-styled “porn king” Steve Crow.

Source / Reuters

Thanks to Jim Retherford / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

The Newest (and Most Vibrant) Presidential Candidate

Posted on August 20, 2008 by RagBlog


Jerry taps running mate Papu
August 20, 2008

MEDWAY, MA — Jerry has selected his Vice President.

It’s Papu, the “Inexplicable Force of Nature.”

By selecting his Vice President now, Jerry, (www.itsjerrytime.com) who announced that he was running for President of the United States on July 4, has scooped both Barack Obama (D) and John McCain (R), who plan to reveal their running mates within a week.

Key to Jerry’s selection is that “Papu can be the ultimate ‘hatchet man’ VP… more Cheney than Cheney, without the brains.”

“There was always only one choice for VP” said Jerry in an exclusive interview. “It was only a matter if he had the desire to do it. And he does. With Papu, there is no red tape. Together, we have the ideas and know-how to get things done.”

Jerry and Papu will be releasing a music video next week and campaign spots incrementally to capture the public’s write-in vote in the November elections.

Link: ozonetv.wordpress.com

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , | 1 Comment

The Next Decade Will Be All About "Deregulation"

Posted on August 20, 2008 by RagBlog

Maybe we all heard it wrong; it’s not the NEW world order – it’s the NAU World Order aka “North American Union”…..

Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog


The North American Union: Democracy Dying in Canada
By Kevin Parkinson / August 13, 2008

Unfortunately, democratic rights in Canada are quickly becoming an illusion. In a sinister plot being carried out underneath our noses, the Canadian government has been working collectively with Mexico and the United States to create the conditions for a merger into a North American Union (NAU). To date, there has been absolutely no public participation concerning this merger.

The plot will thicken even more on August 20-21 when George Bush and Felipe Calderon, the presidents of the United States and Mexico, meet Stephen Harper at the Fairmont Hotel in Montebello, Quebec. Further planning and analysis of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), an informal agreement signed by the leaders of the three countries in 2005, will command center stage.

If Canadians understood the substance of the SPP they would be appalled since it is a direct threat to the existence of Canada as a sovereign country. Internal SPP documents released under FOI requests have shown that U.S. administrative law is being written in stealth to “integrate” and “harmonize” 100’s of regulations in Canada and Mexico.

As Dr. Jerome Corsi has pointed out in “The Late Great U.S.A.”, the European Union is being used as a model for the NAU. The European Union was created incrementally over a 40 year period with public disclosure, but the North American Union have been placed on an incredible 5 year timetable with no public disclosure!

Government leaders, the corporate elite and senior bureaucrats have been meeting secretly for the past 2 years to “fast track” the eventual rollout of the NAU by 2010.

The big question is: why hasn’t the Canadian government used the parliamentary process and the media to inform its citizens regarding the looming NAU?

You are forced to conclude that the mainstream media is guilty of collusion with government and corporate executives and has failed to report the context of the NAU and the implications for the future of Canada.

Essentially, the SPP lead up to the NAU is the sequel to the Free Trade Agreement and we all remember the Mulroney promises of 1989. We were to have more jobs, more prosperity, more investment and the middle class and the working class would benefit, right? Wrong. Many of the jobs and companies went south, unemployment rose, Canadian companies suffered takeovers, but the political pundits keep talking about the increased wealth in North America.

Yes, it’s true that there has been a huge increase in the number of millionaires and billionaires in North America today but what about the rest of us? The multinational corporations have done just fine, and now they are the ones who will be sitting down at conference tables in Montebello with presidents and a prime minister- changing the rules to suit themselves while no media or citizens’ groups will be allowed to observe or participate!

If you doubt this scenario will occur on August 20, I remind you that there was a blackout on media coverage at a previous SPP conference, in Banff, Alberta from September 12-14, 2006 after which Stockwell Day, Minister of Public Safety refused to answer any questions regarding the conference in the foyer of the House of Commons. Apparently, that conference in Banff was so secretive that the Canadian public did not have the right to learn about it.

A full discussion of the SPP is beyond the scope of this article but it is important to remember that the next decade will be all about “deregulation.” It will mean that the protections of government on which we have come to rely, will vanish into thin air. Future generations, our children and grandchildren, will ask us why we fell asleep at the switch and failed to hold our governments accountable.

The United States will become our model. Privatization and deregulation of: health care and drug safety, road construction and transportation, environmental, energy, forestry and agriculture regulations are just a few of the areas where government will abdicate its constitutional responsibility to us.

Once the corporations and government carry out this fascist coup d’etat, we can predict the results- increased prices, decreased wages and a gaping hole in our social safety net like we never imagined. It will bring an end to the middle class in Canada and bring about a huge increase in the ranks of the working poor. It will lead to a “Walmartization” of the economy.

Maude Barlow, in her recent book, “Too Close for Comfort” presents all of the frightening details of “Canada’s future within Fortress North America.”

To add insult to injury, the planners of the Montebello conference, according to Connie Fogal of the Canadian Action Party, have affirmed that U.S. troops will be coordinating security arrangements at Montebello, which include a $1 million fence to keep the expected 10,000 protesters 25 kilometers away from the secretive meeting of three so-called democracies.

George Orwell once said: “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face- forever.”

The boot of the North American Union is only 3 years from our face right now and we need to put tremendous pressure on our Canadian government to unveil its intentions, reveal its secrets and come clean.

Source / Reality Check

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

The "Forgotten War" Won’t Be For Long

Posted on August 20, 2008 by RagBlog

French troops head toward a battle in the Sarobi district of Afghanistan’s Kabul province today. Insurgents ambushed French paratroopers near Kabul, sparking fighting that killed 10 of the soldiers. Photo: Rafiq Maqbool / Associated Press

In Afghanistan, a deadly Taliban trend emerges
By M. Karim Faiez and Laura King / August 20, 2008

Militants’ new reach and power are demonstrated in attacks on U.S. and French troops.

KABUL, Afghanistan — In the worst loss of life for Western troops in ground combat with Taliban forces in Afghanistan, insurgents ambushed and killed 10 French soldiers and wounded 21 in a sustained assault outside the capital, military officials said Tuesday.

Separately, militants made an hours-long attempt to overrun a major U.S. base in southeastern Afghanistan, employing an unnerving new tactic: multiple suicide bombers, three of whom blew themselves up in succession and three others who were shot by the base’s defenders, according to a military official.

Taken together, the attacks against the French and American forces were a graphic demonstration of the growing reach and power of the Taliban and other Islamic militants in Afghanistan, where this year is fast becoming the most lethal for combatants and civilians alike since the fall of the Taliban to U.S.-led forces in 2001.

The pattern of militant strikes against Western troops over the course of the summer “fighting season” points to increased capacity and bolder ambition on the part of the insurgents, at a time when Afghanistan’s central government, led by President Hamid Karzai, is facing a rising tide of popular discontent.

The attack on the French forces, in a rugged mountainous area about 30 miles east of Kabul, also heightened the sense of insecurity close to the capital. Last week, three Western female aid workers were shot to death in a Taliban ambush in Logar province, only about an hour’s drive south of Kabul.

The initial ambush on a patrol of elite French reconnaissance forces in the Sarobi district of Kabul province took place late Monday and the fighting continued into Tuesday, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said in a statement. It said about 100 insurgents took part.

Operations involving large numbers of militants are a tactical departure for the insurgents, who generally have eschewed large-scale frontal assaults in favor of smaller hit-and-run attacks that allow them to melt away when NATO troops use their greatly superior firepower.

The high toll among the French forces occurred despite the quick deployment of reinforcements, including close air support and mobile medical units. Western military officials said a “large number” of insurgents were killed in the battle, but declined to provide a more specific figure.

In France, the loss of so many elite troops at one time dominated headlines and galvanized politicians.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Defense Minister Herve Morin immediately boarded a plane for Afghanistan. Sarkozy attended a memorial service this morning and visited the wounded, then meet with military commanders and Karzai, according to a statement from the presidential palace.

French forces, who first came to Afghanistan in 2002, had until now suffered relatively light casualties, compared with U.S., British and Canadian troops, who are deployed in the most dangerous areas, in the south and east.

Since the U.S.-led invasion, 934 coalition troops have lost their lives, 578 of them American, according to the website icasualties.org. So far this year, 185 coalition troops (103 American) have died.

France has lost a total of 22 troops, Britain 116 and Canada 90. Several other nations have lost troops, including 25 from Germany and 23 from Spain.

The French losses represented the largest number of Western troop fatalities in a single incident in Afghanistan in more than three years. The only larger clusters of foreign military fatalities since the conflict began have involved downed aircraft.

The Taliban leadership, which generally has a sophisticated grasp of the domestic political situation in nations that provide troops to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization force, has sometimes specifically targeted troops from countries in which they believe there is significant opposition to the Afghanistan mission.

Sarkozy drew domestic criticism from both the left and far right for his decision to send 700 additional French troops soon to Afghanistan, bringing the French contingent to more than 2,500.

Adding an emotionally difficult dimension to military authorities’ account of the battle, the Associated Press quoted an Afghan official who spoke on condition of anonymity as saying four of the French soldiers were taken prisoner by the insurgents and then killed. But French officials later said nearly all the deaths were thought to have occurred in the first few moments of the ambush.

The area where the fighting took place is known to be a stronghold of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a veteran Taliban- allied commander with a reputation for brutality. He is believed to be based in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

The attack against the U.S. base in the city of Khowst, near the Pakistan border, was described by military officials as involving a team of suicide bombers who stormed the gates of the base, a large and well-fortified logistical hub known as Camp Salerno.

The same base had been targeted a day earlier by a suicide car bomber. The vehicle blew up at the outer entrance to the base, killing 12 Afghan workers waiting to enter.

In its intensity and degree of coordination, Tuesday’s assault in Khowst was reminiscent of an attack last month by insurgents against a U.S. base on the border of the eastern provinces of Kunar and Nuristan. Nine U.S. troops were killed in that confrontation, and the outpost was nearly overrun.

In Tuesday’s fighting at Khowst, NATO brought in air power, including fighter aircraft and helicopter gunships, to help troops inside defend the base.

It was thought to be the first time such a large number of suicide bombers had taken part in a single assault. News agencies quoted a Taliban commander as saying more suicide bombers than the half-dozen who died had been at the ready, but withdrew to a safe house when it became clear they could not penetrate the base’s perimeter defenses.

Special correspondent Faiez reported from Kabul and Times staff writer King (a href=”mailto:laura.king@latimes.com”>e-mail) from Islamabad, Pakistan. Staff writer Maria De Cristofaro in Rome and special correspondent Audrey Bastide in Paris contributed to this report.

Source / Los Angeles Times

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Reducing All But A Few Fortunate Americans to Debt Slavery

Posted on August 20, 2008 by RagBlog


The Indentured States of America
By Jerome Doolittle / August 18, 2008

As we enter the perfect economic storm, it’s important (though too late) to realize that none of this is an accident. It is all the result of careful long-term planning by our masters on Wall Street and Main Street.

Easy consumer credit, the legalization of usury, the federal deficit, the subprime mess, privatization, the strangling of unions, the collapse of the middle class, deregulation, the lotteries and casinos, the tax code, our nationwide gulag, our broken health care system — these are means to an end.

That end is to reduce all but a few fortunate Americans to debt slavery. It is to make the rest of us into indentured servants, and the process is nearly complete.

Read the whole essay by Thomas Frank from which this comes:

The longing for permanent victory over liberalism is not unique to the west. In country after country, business elites have come up with ingenious ways to limit the public’s political choices. One of the most effective of these has been massive public debt. Naomi Klein has pointed out, in case after case, that the burden of debt has forced democratic countries to accept a laissez-faire system that they find deeply distasteful. Regardless of who borrowed the money, these debts must be repaid — and repaying them, in turn, means that a nation must agree to restructure its economy the way bankers bid: by deregulating, privatizing and cutting spending.

Republicans have ridden to power again and again promising balanced budgets — government debt was “mortgaging our future,” Ronald Reagan admonished in his inaugural address — but once in office they proceed, with a combination of tax cuts and spending increases, to inflate the federal deficit to levels far beyond those reached by their supposedly open-handed liberal rivals. The formal justification is one of the all-time great hoaxes. By cutting taxes, it is said, you will unleash such economic growth that federal revenues will actually increase, so all the additional government spending will be paid for.

Even the theory’s proponents don’t really believe it. David Stockman, the libertarian budget director of the first Reagan administration, did the maths in 1980 and realized it would not rescue the government; it would wreck the government. This is the point where most people would walk away. Instead, Stockman decided it had medicinal value. He realized that with their government brought to the brink of fiscal collapse, the liberals would either have to acquiesce in the reconfiguration of the state or else see the country destroyed. Stockman was candid about this: the left would “have to dismantle [the government’s] bloated, wasteful, and unjust spending enterprises — or risk national ruin.”

This is government-by-sabotage: deficits were a way to smash a liberal state. The Reagan deficits did precisely this. When Reagan took over in 1981, he inherited an annual deficit of $59 billion and a national debt of $914 billion; by the time he and his successor George Bush had finished their work, they had quintupled the deficit and pumped the debt up to more than $3 trillion.

Source / Bad Attitudes

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment