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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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An Arrogrant Disregard For Humans Who May Be Different But Are No Less Worthy

Posted on August 19, 2008 by RagBlog

Water torture in Vietnam

John Buell: Torture’s political invisibility
By John Buell / August 19, 2008

That U.S. military personnel — and their superiors — supported the torture of enemy combatants elicits disturbingly little outrage among most voters. Human beings seldom torture those they regard as like themselves. Humans need and crave community, but throughout history narrow definitions of community and exaggerated claims on its behalf have occasioned grave injustices.

The most widely accepted defense of torture is a limited one: a nation possesses a sovereign right to torture a terrorist who purportedly knows the whereabouts of a ticking time bomb. If authorities had solid reason to know that an individual possessed such knowledge, it would present a serious moral dilemma.

Torture, however, has been employed well beyond those extreme parameters. Jane Mayer argues in her new book “The Dark Side” that after 9-11 the government emphasized “interrogation over due process to pre-empt future attacks” even before any ticking bombs were even being made.

In Portland Phoenix articles, Lance Tapley points out that about 35,000 U.S. citizens are held in solitary confinement at “Supermaxes” (including Maine’s). Many are subjected to torture in the form of beating, sleep deprivation and mental abuse that rival practices at Guantanamo, according to Tapley.

Torture’s political invisibility is remarkable given its counterproductive consequences. Tapley points out that the torture of Supermax prisoners, most of whom are mentally ill, leads to high rates of recidivism and poses great public risk.

Frank Rich, commenting on Mayer, suggests: “torture may well be enabling future attacks… false confessions and [an] avalanche of misinformation since 9-11… compromised prosecutions, allowed other culprits to escape and sent the American military on wild-goose chases.”

Some Americans do oppose torture, but even many who are opposed won’t acknowledge that “we” torture individuals not privy to secret bomb information. For example, prison authorities, major media and political leaders have not challenged Tapley’s specific factual assertions. Nonetheless, none have acted on his findings. Many national leaders even engage in tortuous redefinitions of torture.

These responses may have deep origins. Our world now presents shrinking employment options, rapid changes in neighborhoods and complex interdependence. Social turmoil leads many Americans, steeped in traditional notions of the U.S. as “a city upon a hill” in possession of unique truth, to embrace a problematic conviction: individuals whose differences in religion, lifestyle or ethnicity pose no direct threat really are dangerous.

The world is seen as irrevocably divided between a virtuous “us” and a dangerous “them.” We would never torture or would do so only for overwhelming reasons. When victims of our torture attack or murder us, their actions merely confirm our conviction that they are “basically evil.”

Greater equality and adequate security might blunt xenophobic responses to economic crisis. Nonetheless, especially in a world becoming ever more multicultural, achieving progressive reforms is unlikely without also challenging some prevalent forms of fundamentalism. These dogmatic and exclusionary creeds blind us to the limits of our own intelligence, deny opportunities for full self-development, and preclude social justice movements across racial and religious lines.

For the sake of others and ourselves, we need dialogues to explore sympathetically the deeper — and inherently contestable — assertions about God, truth and morality that underlie major religious, national and ethnic communities. Nations also must acknowledge that they can no longer manage all that goes on even within their own borders. “Multinational” corporations constrain national governments.

Nations should acknowledge the contributions that transnational labor and environmental activists can make by adding labor and environmental standards to the corporate protections in trade agreements. Our willingness to articulate, collectively revise and live by international civil liberties standards would also lead more of the world’s people to disclose terrorist criminal conspiracies.

What if, as James Der Derian, director of the Global Security Program at Brown University, has argued, ” border guards, concrete barriers and earthen levees not only prove inadequate but act as force multipliers, producing automated bungling that transform isolated events and singular attacks into global disasters.” We must, he argues, “ask if such mega-catastrophes are no longer an exception but part of densely networked systems that defy national management.”

Our support of torture and our desperate efforts to deny its prevalence — like defenses of slavery — bespeak an arrogant disregard of humans who may be different but are no less worthy. They also emanate from and intensify a false sense of security that poses increased risks to us all.

[John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers may contact him at jbuell@acadia.net. ]

Source / Bangor Daily News

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San Marcos : Dog Dies After Traffic Cop Ignores Owners’ Pleas

Posted on August 19, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

The law in San Marcos: Hays County Courthouse. Looks mighty pretty. Postcard courtesy of Phyllis C. Rummel.

“Who’s dying? Relax,” Stephens said as his cruiser’s dashboard camera captured the interaction.

“My dog,” Gonzalez said during the Aug. 5 traffic stop.

Source / ABC News. [See video below.]

Cop: ‘It’s a dog, it’s OK. You can get another one.’
August 17, 2008

SAN MARCOS, Texas — A police officer was accused of inappropriate behavior after his misconduct may have resulted in a dog’s death, ABC News reported.

Officer Paul Stephens pulled over Michael Gonzalez for speeding at 100 miles an hour down an interstate highway, prompting the driver to get out of the car, saying, “He’s dying.”

Gonzales and his girlfriend Krystal Hernandez explained that they were speeding to reach a veterinary clinic because their pet poodle Missy was choking.

The dashboard camera of the police car shows Officer Stephens yelling and criticizing the couple for putting other people’s lives at risk for a dog.

“You’re driving down the highway at 100 per hour,” he said. “It’s a dog, it’s OK. You can get another one. Relax.”

Stephens kept Gonzalez on the roadside for 15 minutes. The dog died as the couple waited for Stephens to issue a citation.

The couple tried to convince the officers several different ways to allow them to save their pet, KWTX Channel 10 News reported.

Gonzalez and Hernandez said they begged Stephens to let them go to the vet and turn themselves in for the speeding ticket later.

Gonzalez also offered to stay behind with the officer while Hernandez took the dog to the vet.

But Stephens ignored their pleas.

Police supervisors called the incident a “rookie mistake” and did not found Stephens guilty of any misconduct.

“This was not our finest hour,” said San Marcos Police Chief Howard Williams.

However, Williams did say that Stephens behavior was less than stellar.

“His world was collapsing. And what the officer says to him, basically, is, ‘I don’t care,'” Williams said.

Earlier this week, a police officer in Arizona was acquitted of charges of animal cruelty after leaving a police dog in a patrol car for 13 hours on a hot day last summer, the Associated Press reported.

Recent examples of police misconduct towards people are unfortunately no less appalling and usually include the use of tasers.

Police in South Carolina punched a teenage boy 13 times in the face before tasering him as he lay prone on the ground.

Police tasered an injured teen from Ozark, Missouri up to 19 times after he fell from a highway overpass in late July.

The 16-year-old had broken his back and heel when the officers began tasering him.

In yet another bizarre instance of police violence, a 66-year-old minister was tasered and beaten by hospital security guards for what he claims was a joke.

In that incident, hospital security cameras caught five officers kicking Rev. Al Poisson on the ground for at least five minutes.

Source / The Raw Story

Choking pet dies while owner waits for traffic ticket — ABC News

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The Most Trusted Man in America

Posted on August 19, 2008 by RagBlog


You can’t be serious: How a comedian became the most influential voice in American politics
by Leonard Doyle / August 19, 2008

See video below.

When Jon Stewart inaugurated his fake news anchor on The Daily Show eight years ago, his goal was to send up the hyperbolic and manufactured controversy of US Cable News and, if possible, be even more outrageous. Now, in a wonderful through-the-looking-glass moment, he has supplanted the subjects of his mockery in the country’s current affairs consciousness, and finds himself crowned the bemused voice of reason in an insane world.The underground comic has become such a cultural touchstone that The New York Times asked this week whether he has become “the most trusted man in America”.

For anyone who has missed the influential anchor, then his take on the way mainstream media peddles false rumours about Barack Obama is instructive. He calls it “Baracknophobia” and shows clips of blow-dried anchors and experts repeating widely-believed but baseless rumours – that the Democrat is actually a secret Muslim, a plagiarist, a misogynist etc. The purveyor of fake news lacerates the networks’ talking heads as they blame the internet for rumour mongering about Obama.

The highlight is a straight-faced Mr Stewart saying: “Oh, this is interesting. SomeguyI’veneverheardof.com is reporting presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama has lady parts. Obviously scurrilous and unfounded, we’ll examine it tonight in our special, ‘Barack Obama’s Vagina: The October Surprise In His Pants’.”

The latest sign of how far the show and its host have come from their edgy early days will come at the Democratic Convention in Denver, where he and his reporters are fully accredited.

When asked last year by the Pew Research Centre to name the journalist they most admired, Americans placed the fake news anchor Mr Stewart at number four on the list. He was tied with such luminaries as Tom Brokaw of NBC, Dan Rather, then of CBS, and Anderson Cooper of CNN.

The Daily Show and the equally funny and successful Colbert Report shows are broadcast more than 23 times a week, “from Comedy Central’s World News Headquarters in New York”. The side-street studio on Manhattan’s West Side is not only the undisputed locus of fake news, but it is increasingly the epicentre of real news – administered with a wrapping of college humour.

The whispered advice of a State Department spokesman to a foreign correspondent trying to make sense of American politics was very simple: tune into The Daily Show. “I watch the reruns every morning at 10.30,” she said, “it’s the only way to find out what’s really going on.”

The Conflict in Georgia

The Daily Show is also a top priority for ambitious politicians and was described by Newsweek as “the coolest pit stop on television” for presidential candidates, world leaders and ex-presidents. While mainstream news gave an even-handed report on the legacy of the Blair-Bush years after Tony Blair’s farewell visit to Washington last year, The Daily Show tore Mr Blair to ribbons.

One of the programme’s signature techniques – of using video montages showing politicians contradicting themselves – is now a staple technique of mainstream news shows.

Nor is The Daily Show afraid of tackling what it calls “super depressing” stories, such as President George Bush’s decision to approve the use of torture after the September 11 attacks and the unprecedented concentration of executive power by the White House. Interviews with serious authors such as Seymour Hersh have helped focus attention on potentially illegal acts by the Bush administration and win a wider audience for their work.

Mr Stewart’s frequent outbursts of “Are you insane?!” seems to capture the post-M*A*S*H, post-Catch-22 sensibilities of a country that waged a war in Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. Now, with the most promising candidate in generations running for president, Mr Stewart asks whether the country may be about to reject him at the ballot box because of rumours that he is Muslim.

The purpose of The Daily Show is to entertain, not inform, Mr Stewart insists, and he likens his job to “throwing spitballs” from the back of the room. But he and the high-powered writers who work with him like nothing better than tackling the big issues of the day – in ways that straight news programs cannot.

“Hopefully, the process is to spot things that would be grist for the funny mill,” Mr Stewart, 45, told The New York Times. “In some respects, the heavier subjects are the ones that are most loaded with opportunity because they have the most … potential energy, so to delve into that gives you the largest combustion, the most interest. I don’t mean for the audience. I mean for us.”

The Daily Show’s success comes from blending the informality and attitude of bloggers with the hard-nosed research and expertise of the best investigative reporters to reveal a new news medium. Like bloggers, a key to his show’s success is the authenticity that comes from in-depth reporting, combined with stating the blindingly obvious.

Every day begins with a morning meeting where material culled from 15 video recorders, as well as newspapers, magazines and websites, is pored over. The meeting, Mr Stewart says, “would be very unpleasant for most people to watch: it’s really a gathering of curmudgeons expressing frustration and upset, and the rest of the day is spent trying to … repress that through whatever creative devices we can find”. Josh Lieb, one of the executive producers of the show, describes the process as looking for stories that “make us angry in a whole new way”.

By 3pm a script has been prepared and Mr Stewart’s rehearsals begin. After an hour of rewrites, taping the show starts at 6pm.

The fake news anchor may be the antidote to fake news, which has a habit of showing up in American newspapers. After all, the US government had an initiative in 2005 to plant “positive news” in Iraqi newspapers to sway public opinion about the war. The Bush administration has worked closely with big business to keep it flowing.

According to Professor Robert Love, of Columbia Journalism School: “They have used fringe scientists and fake experts to muddy scientific debates on global warming, stem-cell research, evolution, and other matters.”

For all his fakery, Mr Stewart may be pointing the way to the future of news: bluntness and informality fused with ruthless editing and a funny bone which helps to ensure that stories he wants to cover are watched.

©independent.co.uk

Source, including a couple more videos / The Independent

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The US Does Not Really Have a Foreign Policy

Posted on August 19, 2008 by RagBlog


The US missile defence system is the magic pudding that will never run out
By George Monbiot / August 19, 2008

Poland is just the latest fall guy for an American foreign policy dictated by military industrial lobbyists in Washington

It’s a novel way to take your own life. Just as Russia demonstrates what happens to former minions that annoy it, Poland agrees to host a US missile defence base. The Russians, as Poland expected, respond to this proposal by offering to turn the country into a parking lot. This proves that the missile defence system is necessary after all: it will stop the missiles Russia will now aim at Poland, the Czech Republic and the UK in response to, er, their involvement in the missile defence system.

The American government insists that the interceptors, which will be stationed on the Baltic coast, have nothing to do with Russia: their purpose is to defend Europe and the US against the intercontinental ballistic missiles Iran and North Korea don’t possess. This is why they are being placed in Poland, which, as every geography student in Texas knows, shares a border with both rogue states.

They permit us to look forward to a glowing future, in which missile defence, according to the Pentagon, will “protect our homeland … and our friends and allies from ballistic missile attack”; as long as the Russians wait until it’s working before they nuke us. The good news is that, at the present rate of progress, reliable missile defence is only 50 years away. The bad news is that it has been 50 years away for the past six decades.

The system has been in development since 1946, and so far it has achieved a grand total of nothing. You wouldn’t know it if you read the press releases published by the Pentagon’s missile defence agency: the word “success” features more often than any other noun. It is true that the programme has managed to hit two out of the five missiles fired over the past five years during tests of its main component, the ground-based midcourse missile defence (GMD) system. But, sadly, these tests bear no relation to anything resembling a real nuclear strike.

All the trials run so far – successful or otherwise – have been rigged. The target, its type, trajectory and destination, are known before the test begins. Only one enemy missile is used, as the system doesn’t have a hope in hell of knocking down two or more. If decoy missiles are deployed, they bear no resemblance to the target and they are identified as decoys in advance. In order to try to enhance the appearance of success, recent flight tests have become even less realistic: the agency has now stopped using decoys altogether when testing its GMD system.

This points to one of the intractable weaknesses of missile defence: it is hard to see how the interceptors could ever outwit enemy attempts to confuse them. As Philip Coyle – formerly a senior official at the Pentagon with responsibility for missile defence – points out, there are endless means by which another state could fool the system. For every real missile it launched, it could dispatch a host of dummies with the same radar and infra-red signatures. Even balloons or bits of metal foil would render anything resembling the current system inoperable. You can reduce a missile’s susceptibility to laser penetration by 90% by painting it white. This sophisticated avoidance technology, available from your local hardware shop, makes another multibillion component of the programme obsolete. Or you could simply forget about ballistic missiles and attack using cruise missiles, against which the system is useless.

Missile defence is so expensive and the measures required to evade it so cheap that if the US government were serious about making the system work it would bankrupt the country, just as the arms race helped to bring the Soviet Union down. By spending a couple of billion dollars on decoy technologies, Russia would commit the US to trillions of dollars of countermeasures. The cost ratios are such that even Iran could outspend the US.

The US has spent between $120bn and $150bn on the programme since Ronald Reagan relaunched it in 1983. Under George Bush, the costs have accelerated. The Pentagon has requested $62bn for the next five-year tranche, which means that the total cost between 2003 and 2013 will be $110bn. Yet there are no clear criteria for success. As a recent paper in the journal Defense and Security Analysis shows, the Pentagon invented a new funding system in order to allow the missile defence programme to evade the government’s usual accounting standards. It’s called spiral development, which is quite appropriate, because it ensures that the costs spiral out of control.

Spiral development means, in the words of a Pentagon directive, that “the end-state requirements are not known at programme initiation”. Instead, the system is allowed to develop in whatever way officials think fit. The result is that no one has the faintest idea what the programme is supposed to achieve, or whether it has achieved it. There are no fixed dates, no fixed costs for any component of the programme, no penalties for slippage or failure, no standards of any kind against which the system can be judged. And this monstrous scheme is still incapable of achieving what a few hundred dollars’ worth of diplomacy could do in an afternoon.

So why commit endless billions to a programme that is bound to fail? I’ll give you a clue: the answer is in the question. It persists because it doesn’t work.

US politics, because of the failure by both Republicans and Democrats to deal with the problems of campaign finance, is rotten from head to toe. But under Bush, the corruption has acquired Nigerian qualities. Federal government is a vast corporate welfare programme, rewarding the industries that give millions of dollars in political donations with contracts worth billions. Missile defence is the biggest pork barrel of all, the magic pudding that won’t run out, however much you eat. The funds channelled to defence, aerospace and other manufacturing and service companies will never run dry because the system will never work.

To keep the pudding flowing, the administration must exaggerate the threats from nations that have no means of nuking it – and ignore the likely responses of those that do. Russia is not without its own corrupting influences. You could see the grim delight of the Russian generals and defence officials last week, who have found in this new deployment an excuse to enhance their power and demand bigger budgets. Poor old Poland, like the Czech Republic and the UK, gets strongarmed into becoming America’s groundbait.

If we seek to understand American foreign policy in terms of a rational engagement with international problems, or even as an effective means of projecting power, we are looking in the wrong place. The government’s interests have always been provincial. It seeks to appease lobbyists, shift public opinion at crucial stages of the political cycle, accommodate crazy Christian fantasies and pander to television companies run by eccentric billionaires. The US does not really have a foreign policy. It has a series of domestic policies which it projects beyond its borders. That they threaten the world with 57 varieties of destruction is of no concern to the current administration. The only question of interest is who gets paid and what the political kickbacks will be.

Source / The Guardian

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US Banking: The Shit Has Yet to Hit the Fan

Posted on August 19, 2008 by RagBlog


Large U.S. Bank Collapse Seen Ahead
By Jan Dahinten / August 19, 2008

SINGAPORE — The worst of the global financial crisis is yet to come and a large U.S. bank will fail in the next few months as the world’s biggest economy hits further troubles, former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff said on Tuesday.

“The U.S. is not out of the woods. I think the financial crisis is at the halfway point, perhaps. I would even go further to say ‘the worst is to come’,” he told a financial conference.

“We’re not just going to see mid-sized banks go under in the next few months, we’re going to see a whopper, we’re going to see a big one, one of the big investment banks or big banks,” said Rogoff, who is an economics professor at Harvard University and was the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist from 2001 to 2004.

“We have to see more consolidation in the financial sector before this is over,” he said, when asked for early signs of an end to the crisis.

“Probably Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — despite what U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson said — these giant mortgage guarantee agencies are not going to exist in their present form in a few years.”

Rogoff’s comments come as investors dumped shares of the largest U.S. home funding companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on Monday after a newspaper report said government officials may have no choice but to effectively nationalize the U.S. housing finance titans.

A government move to recapitalize the two companies by injecting funds could wipe out existing common stock holders, the weekend Barron’s story said. Preferred shareholders and even holders of the two government-sponsored entities’ $19 billion of subordinated debt would also suffer losses.

Rogoff said multi-billion dollar investments by sovereign wealth funds from Asia and the Middle East in western financial firms may not necessarily result in large profits because they had not taken into account the broader market conditions that the industry faces.

“There was this view early on in the crisis that sovereign wealth funds could save everybody. Investment banks did something stupid, they lost money in the sub-prime, they’re great buys, sovereign wealth funds come in and make a lot of money by buying them.

“That view neglects the point that the financial system has become very bloated in size and needed to shrink,” Rogoff told the conference in Singapore, whose wealth funds GIC and Temasek have invested billions in Merrill Lynch and Citigroup

In response to the sharp U.S. housing retrenchment and turmoil in credit markets, the U.S. Federal Reserve has reduced interest rates by a cumulative 3.25 percentage points to 2 percent since mid-September.

Rogoff said the U.S. Federal Reserve was wrong to cut interest rates as “dramatically” as it did.

“Cutting interest rates is going to lead to a lot of inflation in the next few years in the United States.”

© Thomson Reuters 2008

Source / Reuters

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