Brewing a Disaster with North American Agriculture

Posted on April 19, 2008 by RagBlog

Photo by Aimee Donnelly

Sowing Disaster: Why We Need a New Farm Bill
by Christopher D. Cook / April 18, 2008

Congress passes its share of boondoggles, but there’s a real doozy on the docket April 18. If the nearly $300 billion Farm Bill passes in its current form, the American public will pay billions of dollars to large-scale farmers and food corporations for the following end results: an oversupply of unhealthful junk food that worsens our national obesity epidemic; severe depletion of soil and air through overuse of pesticides and destructive farming practices; and the hastened removal of small farms from the land, eroding the spirit and finances of rural communities across the U.S.

To be sure, there are positive elements in the bill, which gets revisited every five years. There’s funding for conservation and nutrition programs, even small bits (in the $5 million range) for innovative community food security projects that expand markets for small farmers while making food accessible to poor inner-city residents. But the bill’s Commodity Title erases all that – using tax dollars of up to $20 billion a year to finance big growers’ production of corn, wheat, and other commodities that are used as ingredients in everything from cooking oil, to sweeteners and fattening agents in processed foods, to livestock feed and auto fuel.

While supporting farmers to produce basic foodstuffs is a laudable policy goal, our current farm-subsidy system accomplishes something far different, propping up profoundly unsustainable growing practices while undermining the nation’s health and its farming and food future. By upholding subsidies for big agriculture, Congress is not only wasting taxpayer dollars at a time of soaring crop and food prices; more fundamentally, it’s undermining vital efforts to make our food supply more healthful and sustainable, both environmentally and economically.

Read all of it here. / Common Dreams / The Rag Blog

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Hugo Chavez: Accomplishments of a Rebel

Posted on April 19, 2008 by RagBlog


Venezuela: Democracy, Socialism and Imperialism
By James Petras / April 17, 2008

Introduction

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez remains the world’s leading secular, democratically elected political leader who has consistently and publicly opposed imperialist wars in the Middle East, attacked extra-territorial intervention and US and European Union complicity in kidnapping and torture. Venezuela plays the major role in sharply reducing the price of oil for the poorest countries in the Caribbean region and Central America, thus substantially aiding them in their balance of payments, without attaching any ‘strings’ to this vital assistance. Venezuela has been in the forefront in supporting free elections and opposing human right abuses in the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia by pro-US client regimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Colombia. No other country in the Americas has done more to break down the racial barriers to social mobility and the acquisition of land for Afro-Latin and Indio Americans. President Chavez has been on the cutting edge of efforts toward greater Latin American integration – despite opposition from the United States and several regional regimes, who have opted for bilateral free trade agreements with the US.

Even more significant, President Chavez is the only elected president to reverse a US backed military coup (in 48 hours) and defeat a (US-backed) bosses’ lockout, and return the economy to double-digit growth over the subsequent 4 years.1 President Chavez is the only elected leader in the history of Latin America to successfully win eleven straight electoral contests against US-financed political parties and almost the entire private mass media over a nine-year period. Finally President Chavez is the only leader in the last half-century who came within 1% of having a popular referendum for a ‘socialist transformation’ approved, a particularly surprising result in a country in which less than 30% of the work force is made up of peasants and factory workers.

President Chavez has drastically reduced long-term poverty faster than any regime in the region,2 demonstrating that a nationalist-welfare regime is much more effective in ending endemic social ills than its neo-liberal counterparts. A rigorous, empirical study of the socio-economic performance of the Chavez government demonstrates its success in a whole series of indicators after the defeat of the counter-revolutionary coup and lockout and after the nationalization of petroleum (2003).

GDP has grown by more than 87% with only a small part of the growth being in oil. The poverty rate has been cut in half (from 54% in 2003 at the height of the bosses’ lockout to 27% in 2007; and extreme poverty has been reduced from 43% in 1996 to 9% in 2007), and unemployment by more than half (from 17% in 1998 to 7% in 2007). The economy has created jobs at a rate nearly three times that of the United States during its most recent economic expansion. Accessible health care for the poor has been successfully expanded with the number of primary care physicians in the public sector increasing from 1,628 in 1998 to 19,571 by early 2007. About 40% of the population now has access to subsidized food. Access to education, especially higher education, has also been greatly expanded for poor families. Real (inflation adjusted) social spending per person has increased by more than 300%. 3

His policies have once and for all refuted the notion that the competitive demands of ‘globalization’ (deep and extensive insertion in the world market) are incompatible with large-scale social welfare policies. Chavez has demonstrated that links to the world market are compatible with the construction of a more developed welfare state under a popularly-based government.

The large-scale, long-term practical accomplishments of the Chavez government, however have been overlooked by liberal and social democratic academics in Venezuela and their colleagues in the US and Europe, who prefer to criticize secondary institutional and policy weaknesses, failing to take into account the world-historic significance of the changes taking place in the context of a hostile, aggressively militarist-driven empire.4

No reasonable and rigorous contemporary analysis can seriously provide an accurate assessment of Venezuela while glossing over the tremendous accomplishments achieved during the Hugo Chavez presidency.

It is within the framework of Chavez’ innovative and courageous political-social breakthroughs that we should proceed to an analysis of the advances, contradictions and negative aspects of specific political, economic, social and cultural policies, practices and institutions.

Read all of it here. / Information Clearing House

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From a Foreign Correspondent

Posted on April 19, 2008 by RagBlog

This came to us covertly and we don’t know who wrote it. But it’s pretty darn funny, so we hope you enjoy as we did.

The Rag

FUCK A DUCK
ANYTHING FOR A BUCK

I’m watching the financial channel here in Panama, in Spanish, in the middle of the night. On this particular night the financial pundits and talking heads are taking turns ruminating about the Bear Stearns bailout with taxpayer dollars. First Bear Stearns looked like it was alright, but they were engaged in a common business scam, borrowing money using accounts receivable as collateral. Most businesses do this and as long as there is sufficient cash flow to pay the vig, or interest due they get away with it. Accounts receivable has two faces, or two meanings, in one sense it is a number in the company books that shows what the company is owed. Then there is the real accounts receivable, money owed to the company that they will actually receive some time in the future. The former, the one in the books, is usually much larger than the latter; the money the company actually expects to receive.

Sometimes the company gets found out. And the people who are lending them money demand that they use the real accounts receivable numbers. This happened to Bear Stearns. It happened long ago to Billy Sol Estes, most of you don’t remember him. But you do remember Enron, their accounts receivables were from companies that didn’t exist except on paper. When Bear Stearns tried to roll over their short term paper, based on home loans that they claimed were receivable, it came to light that the loans weren’t receivable at all and the collateral on the loans (the homes themselves) weren’t worth what they said they were. The lenders refused to lend them more operating capital. And they began to go down the tubes.

J.P. Morgan offered to bail them out. Morgan offered them two bucks a share for the company. Morgan would then be the proud new owner of Bear Stearns accounts receivable, which wouldn’t really be receivable. This would leave Morgan holding the bag, an empty bag, making them vulnerable in the near future. Something had to be done, the big corporations in the lending business were setting themselves up like a row of dominos, and the first one was starting to tip over. Two dollars a share was probably generous, Bear Stearns was unable to continue to operate so in reality they were worth zip, squat, nada, they were bankrupt.

Uncle Sugar offered to jump in and take J.P. Morgan’s back. In effect pony up the money, two dollars a share, to cover Morgan’s bid for a worthless company. Whoa, wait a minute said Morgan, if the Fed was going to pass out free taxpayers’ money, then why not get while the getting was good. Next morning Morgan announced that they had made a mistake, seems the worthless company, Bear Stearns, was really worth ten dollars a share. The Fed went for it and promptly put up five times the original bailout money.

Well it was late and my mind was wandering, first it sounded like, “keep watching the show, there is no one behind the curtain.” Then it wandered to “fuck a duck, anything for a buck.” And I remembered the poster and how it all came down and all alone in my Panama hotel, stretched out nude on the bed, I began to laugh, and the more I remembered about it the more I laughed. I got a big shit-eating grin right now because I can’t wait to tell you this story.

Come on back with me now. This is Boston, its 1970. I’m living on Erie Street that runs out of Central Square in Cambridge. Sometimes I sell underground papers, and do some high level panhandling around Harvard Square, and sometimes around Boston City Hall, to pay the rent and keep food in my stomach, plus something to roll in the quite moments. But my real occupation is plotting the demise of U.S. imperialism. This was a very real struggle in those days and it seemed like it had possibilities. Like every great struggle it had many fronts. One of the fronts in that moment was the Troika Free Poster Factory. I was there at the beginning; actually I was a part of the beginning.

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had a school. It was a small school, a few students who showed artistic promise attended, most if not all on scholarships provided by the Museum. A group of these fledgling artists, the politically aware and therefore anti-war ones formed a small collective within the MFA School to do something about the horrible Nixonian blood fest in Vietnam. Their politics motivated them to harness the means at hand and when they saw an opportunity, they acted. The school provided the tools for the artists to do their thing; paint and canvas, sculpting clay, knives, chisels, air brushes, silk screens, a copy camera and a dark room. Probably a lot more, that I don’t know about or don’t remember.

I knew about the copy camera, I also knew that in the evenings there was usually no one around and a door that wasn’t locked. I had more or less of an ID factory going over on Beacon Hill, just down the alley from Suffolk Law School, behind the State House. Also in this alley was the State Print Shop whose trash I regularly sorted through to garner State paper that I could use to bolster ID sets needed by deserters, anti-war fugitives, and people who needed to get out of the country. I found blank state licenses for all sorts of trades, blank state ID’s, official letterheads and envelopes, and sometimes rubber stamps, and embossing discs in the print shop trash.

One of the important pieces of ID in those days was a Draft Card. Every male citizen between the ages of eighteen and fifty had to carry around a draft card; it was the only ID that was required by federal law. I couldn’t just “find” these, although I suppose a regular visit to the trash behind some draft board offices might yield one. Since this was a common piece of ID I needed lots of them. Some friends in Texas had a printing press and were willing to run some off, but they needed a negative with which to make a plate.

I borrowed a nice clean draft card from a young man who had made the mistake of registering for the draft, and in the evening set out for the MFA School to use the copy camera. As usual the door was unlocked and no one was around when I slipped in and made my way to the camera and dark room section. I spent a while trying to get the right one hundred percent size and to locate the film and get it loaded right on the vacuum back of the camera and to get the exposure and developing right. I’d done some film developing but most of this process I was trying to accomplish by trial and error. While I was still puzzling my way through the door opened and two students came in. It’s a small student body, everyone knows everyone and they didn’t know me. For a few seconds we stood looking at each other, they were wondering who I was, I was wondering if I should bolt out on to Huntington Ave and escape to a friend’s pad over on Hemingway street. It was a guy and a woman, they didn’t look dangerous. I decided to hold my ground, I needed that negative.

The woman spoke first. “What are you doing?” She didn’t sound angry or suspicious more like inquisitive.

“I’m trying to get this camera to work.”

They stepped closer, “What are you trying to do?”

“I need to make a negative of this at a hundred percent, but it’s not working out too well.”

“Maybe I can help,” she came closer peering at the settings on the camera. The guy came over; he was looking down at the draft card. It took a moment but pretty quickly it all became clear to him, he tugged at her sleeve and nodded toward the draft card. Then she was looking at it too and then at me, back again to the card. All three of us stood looking at the card, they were trying to make up their minds, and I gave them the time, maintaining the silence. They looked at each other. They looked at the card. Silently they came to an agreement about what to do. I waited, eyeing the door, ready to move.

She reached up, “you’ve got to crank this up ‘til the two arrows meet.” The guy nodded his accent, about the arrows and about the card and about what I was trying to do. I stopped looking at the door. We had a conspiracy going. She moved the card and adjusted the focus, we killed the lights and he cut a piece of film, we took the shot, they introduced me to the “bump” light, the guy took the film into the dark room.

With the light back on she introduced herself, she was Pamela, Pam. She told me that he was Matt. She never asked what I was going to do with the negative, she didn’t need to. We talked about the school and about Boston and about the war. We each knew that this was a fortunate meeting of destiny. Matt joined us while we waited for the film to dry. They went to demos and had done some artwork for some anti-war leaflets, they wondered if they could do more. They helped me opaque out the typed in information on the neg. We went over to the Greek coffee shop and talked ‘til late. We made plans to get together in a couple of days. It didn’t yet have a name, but the idea was pregnant, soon there would be a birth, we would call it the Troika Free Poster Factory.

The next time we got together, they brought three other MFA School students and I brought a friend who had an idea. He wanted to make a poster, it was somewhere in his head, it was his vision of the government. He wanted to depict them as sycophant weirdoes in a way that he saw them. It was coming up to election time, but there was no hope that anything would change, kind of like now. We tossed his idea around and in doing so Troika was born. We had a name and set to work on our symbol, in this case it became a flag or more correctly a banner which we would silk screen, everyone contributing a part, a color, a design, according to their feeling for it.

We also defined how we would operate. We wouldn’t take peoples ideas and do the work, but we would work together with the poster creator, teach our skills, use our means and allow people the opportunity to express themselves. The posters would be produced by their authors, no names would be allowed and no organizations would be noted. Simply a person’s artistic idea produced as a poster, anonymously and with a view that would be anarchist and anti-war.

That first poster began to take shape that night; the artwork would be in the form of a photo depicting my friends view. When I moved into the Erie Street place I found a metal box full of fishing lures, or more aptly fishing plugs. There were three or four dozen of them, wooden or plastic plugs, three or four inches long, painted in various colors and each with eyes on one end looking like some underwater bug, all had fish hooks in various places. With the help of some modeling clay we stood the plugs on end, in even rows and files, with all their eyes looking in the same direction. Then we took a picture with black and white film and printed it using the MFA darkroom. The posters for the most part were all formatted to fit seventeen by twenty two poster boards. The copy camera blew it up to fit on the top two thirds of the poster and below we art-typed the words “The government has been elected.” From there we fabricated a silk screen, putting on the emulsion and burning and developing a screen. We printed a couple dozen copies and my friend hung them around town, where they drew puzzled looks, but left the desired impression. By the time we finished that one we had a half dozen more posters in the works. I don’t remember them all but I do remember that they were all poignant and expressed in an artistic way the feelings of many anti-war people.

Which brings us, in a long round about way to the poster I was thinking about, that caused me to start laughing while watching the financial news, in Spanish, lying naked on my hotel room bed, one night in Panama.

This was the inspiration of my friend Carl. We got a hold of one of the many renditions of Leda and the Swan. She was a figure in Greek mythology, impregnated by the “god” Zeus while he was disguised as a swan. We made this one a little bigger probably twenty two by thirty five, and silk screened it on twenty pound paper coated on one side. In the center of this poster was Leda and the Swan getting it on, we did that in black ink. Above Leda and Swan in red ink it said, “FUCK A DUCK” and below the graphic it said, “ANYTHING FOR A BUCK.” That in itself has a certain amount of humor in it. But there is more to it.

We printed a couple dozen copies. At night, armed with a half dozen cans of condensed milk we left Central Square and skulking up Mass Ave toward Harvard Square we began “hanging” them on storefront windows. There is nothing like condensed milk to attach paper to glass, it puts Elmer’s Glue to shame. It’s damn near permanent. By the time we got to the little coffee shop, (gone now,) in Harvard Square we were down to our last one. After a couple of cups of coffee and cigarettes, we stepped out to look for a good location. We were directly across from Coolidge Bank. This was the bank that had to contract to issue welfare checks to the poor in the Boston area; they were unfriendly and arrogant to the people who came there to cash their meager stipends. What better spot? I stood chickie, (lookout,) while Carl church-keyed open a can of milk and splashed it on the window of Coolidge Bank, then working together we put the poster up and rubbed it in real good. We walked back toward Erie Street admiring our work along the way and called it a night.

The next morning I panhandled my way from Central Square to Harvard Square looking for breakfast and cigarette money and maybe a start on a small bag of weed. Along the way I saw all the FUCK A DUCK posters we had distributed to the windows of shops and stores. At Harvard Square I noticed a small crowd in front of Coolidge Bank, there were about five cops fondling their night sticks, a couple of dudes in suits and half a dozen gawkers all gathered in concentric semi circles around the window with our poster. In the center one of the guys in suits was directing the other suit, who was trying to remove the poster by picking at the corner with his fingernails, making little headway. The picker was picking, the manager suit was directing, the cops were tsk-tsking, and the gawkers were giggling. I sauntered up to stand at the back of the gawk circle.

Finally the picker had picked enough to grab the corner with his fingers, and giving a tug he pulled off the bottom six or so inches that had the words, ANYTHING FOR A BUCK. Now everyone became a gawker. They all stared for about ten seconds. Then the manager suit said to the picker suit, “Let’s go, we got the important part.” With that the cops headed back to sit on their fat asses in their respective squad cars, the suits went into Coolidge Bank, and the giggling gawkers stayed for one last look at the swan doing Leda under the words, FUCK A DUCK.

Down in Panama, I laughed a little harder, picturing the suits at J.P. Morgan grabbing the check from Uncle Sam’s fingers and saying, “Let’s go, we got the important part.”

FUCK A DUCK, ANYTHING FOR A BUCK!!

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Ben Stein’s "Expelled" : A No-Brainer

Posted on April 18, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


He Blinded Me Without Science
By Chez Pazienza / April 17, 2008

Ben Stein has a message for Darwin: “Fuck you!”

It seems incomprehensible that Stein — former Nixon speech writer, game show host, eye drop pitchman and Neil Cavuto love interest — could find a way to further cement his reputation as the smartest dumb person alive, but, bless his heart, he’s done it. Today sees the theatrical release of a full-length documentary presented and narrated by Stein: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed casts the man with the velvet monotone as a sort of Michael Mooresque troublemaker — a mischievous imp out to rankle the establishment and challenge the suffocating status quo, all in the name of getting to the truth that they don’t want you to know about.

And against which authority figure is Stein playing the role of the uppity insurgent?

Science.

Feel free to stop reading if you’ve heard this one before, but Expelled assumes the position not only that the theory of evolution and the faith-based hypothesis known as “intelligent design” are on close-to-equal scientific footing, but that there’s an Illuminatian cabal among the science community, no doubt sitting in a Star Chamber somewhere, seeing to it that any developmental view but Darwin’s is suppressed at all costs. It’s a hell of a parlor trick really, and one the religious right has become admirably adept at exploiting these days: to turn the tables on their adversaries by adopting the tactics and lexicon traditionally associated with the mutinous left, casting themselves as the victimized and oppressed — the little guys, taking up the fight against (literally, as opposed to an omnipotent deity) “The Man.”

In the end though, that’s all it is — a really clever trick, and one that’s played to the hilt in Expelled.

Creating controversy where there is none is positively pedestrian by now, but taking it to the lengths that this new documentary does, and doing it with such a salient level of panache, borders on genius. The SNL writing staff, circa 1977, couldn’t have created a more audaciously comical premise than Ben Stein — a man so square he craps cubes — writing “I Will Not Question Authority” on a blackboard while dressed like Angus Young. Stein is a Dangerous Mind only if you see market-to-market accounting as a ballsy show of defiance, which makes him the perfect impertinent hero for the God-said-it-I-believe-it set.

Unfortunately, no matter how creative the packaging, the lesson being sold in Expelled remains little more than nonsense. Stein and company can wrap themselves in the American flag and the freedom to question that it provides; they can grab a handful of ostensible pop culture street cred by aligning themselves with the likes of Bono; in the end, it doesn’t make so-called intelligent design any more logically sound. It’s still a religious assertion, and not a scientific one. It doesn’t stand up to even the most rudimentary evidential scrutiny, and while it’s always important to ask questions and allow for healthy debate, no matter the topic, at some point a line has to be drawn separating fact from fiction — or distraction. The truth is important because it’s the yardstick by which we measure our reality, and Ben Stein — or anyone else — trying to pass off spectacular whimsy as legitimate fact is, yes, damaging. Not everything can be up for discussion, no matter how large a segment of the population might believe otherwise.

And that’s the best part of all this: Stein and his supposedly rag-tag little group of freedom fighters are neither rag-tag nor little.

In fact, the idea that we’re expected to believe that the religious in this country are few and persecuted is laughable, bordering on offensive.

Last Sunday evening, CNN aired something it called the “Compassion Forum.” It was a live event, broadcast from Messiah College in Pennsylvania, in which an entire roomful of religious leaders — mostly Christian — were granted an audience with the two Democratic candidates for president, one of whom may eventually be the next leader of the free world. For two hours, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama talked not about war, education and the economy, but about how their faith guides them and, to some extent, who loves Jesus more. The fact that either candidate believes that he or she has the luxury right now to spout metaphysical platitudes is nothing short of staggering — though certainly not surprising. Just a few days prior to the “Compassion Forum,” the entire cast of American Idol, dressed in evangelical white, belted its way through Shout to the Lord not once, but twice on national television. And today, the city in which I live, New York, is at a standstill as thousands crowd the streets — streets which have been shut down by police — to reverently welcome an unremarkable man in ridiculous robes and a funny hat who believes that he has a hotline to the creator of the universe and who just wrapped up a meeting with the President of the United States.

In other words, don’t even attempt to claim that the religious suffer for their beliefs in this country. Hell, as long as you insist that you’re doing it in the name of God, you can swap wives and molest children in The Middle of Nowhere, Texas for years before somebody finally comes and hauls your lunatic ass off to jail.

Ben Stein can rage against the scientific machine all he wants. He can shake his fist and shout, “Don’t try to keep me down with your, your gravity, man!” It won’t make a spurious assertion — that intelligent design deserves a seat at the lab station — any more sound, nor will it make Stein anything more than a rebel without a clue.

Source. / Huffington Post / The Rag Blog

Sexpelled: No Intercourse Allowed (Expelled parody)

Backlash to Ben Stein’s Expelled Revs Up With Sexpelled
By Jenna Wortham / April 18, 2008

Just try to question sex theory and see what happens,” begins the trailer for Sexpelled: No Intercouse Allowed. The parody video mocks the Ben Stein-backed anti-Darwinism film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

The manifesto for the video states: “Sexpelled tells of how Sex Theory has thrived unchallenged in the ivory towers of academia, as the explanation for how new babies are created. Proponents of Stork Theory claim that ‘Big Sex’ has been suppressing their claim that babies are delivered by storks.”

The video (right) combines footage from the film and mock interviews with scientists, all set to the bluesy guitar riff from ’80s rock song, “Bad to the Bone.”

The conclusion of the clip plasters the words “Ben Stein is an ignorant fool” across the screen.

Source. / Wired / The Rag Blog

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Now you may kiss the brides…

Posted on April 18, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Nick Anderson / Houston Chronicle

Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

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Peak Oil News : Prices Continue to Surge

Posted on April 18, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


The peak oil crisis: The silly season Is upon us
by Tom Whipple

During the past week, the surge in oil prices continued with crude, gasoline and diesel prices all hitting new highs.

U.S. gasoline consumption may be down by a few tenths of a percent (which seems logical) or then again, it may be up a bit in recent weeks depending on which numbers you are reading. Our Presidential candidates, or at least their handlers, are beginning to grasp that we have a problem here and are beginning to make proposals.

We have clearly entered the silly season, for all three major candidates now have endorsed the notion that the U.S. should stop buying oil for its strategic reserve in order to force prices back down. This might sound sensible until you learn that the U.S. is only squirreling away eight ten-thousandths of the world’s production each day. The Republican candidate for President is now calling for a “holiday” that would suspend the 18.4 cent a gallon federal gas tax. This proposal of course will never pass, but if it should, the hoped-for jump in gasoline sales will quickly move gas prices higher. At a time when prices are rising about 5 cents a week, cutting taxes is unlikely to boost Hummer sales.

Up on Capitol Hill a lot of folks are worried, but as yet few have mustered the courage to propose realistic solutions. Some are beating on the oil companies and are calling for the umpteenth investigation of gas prices. Others want to yank the $18 billion annual tax break the oil industry gets and move the money to researching renewables. The rest just want to increase drilling for oil somewhere – usually in the Atlantic or Alaska — without mentioning that at best it would take decades to produce the oil should some be found. No one wants to mention that our energy crisis now seems months, or perhaps less, away.

It is hard to really blame the politicians. As long as most of us cling to the hope that high gas prices will go away or that a painless silver bullet that will solve our energy problem is just around the corner, few candidates for public office are ready to propose what are thought to be “painful solutions” to our problems. They still shoot messengers.

The great irony in all this is that the problem is simple to understand. World crude oil production has been essentially flat for the last three years while 1.3 billion Chinese, 1.1 billion Indians, and another quarter billion or so living in oil exporting countries continue to increase their oil consumption at a prodigious pace. Incidentally, the Chinese just announced that their diesel imports during the first quarter of 2008 were up seven fold over 2007.

Currently, the real issue is how long it will take the American people to understand the seriousness of a problem that will require decades of pain, discomfort and inconvenience to mitigate. When gasoline and diesel prices go up a few more dollars a gallon, or when permanent shortages develop, everybody will get the message and media will start to talk coherently. Until then, understanding will be incremental and painfully slow

Read all of it here. / Energy Bulletin

Thanks to Roger Baker / The Rag Blog

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Erosion of Pay Check Drives Economic Downturn

Posted on April 18, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Kim Baker works at a roof tile factory with declining business. “We don’t just hop in the car and go shopping or get something to eat,” he said, with his daughter Bailey and wife, Debbie, right. Photo by J. Kevin Fitzsimons / NYT

Workers Get Fewer Hours, Deepening the Downturn
By Peter S. Goodman / April 18, 2008

Not long ago, overtime was a regular feature at the Ludowici Roof Tile factory in eastern Ohio. Not anymore. With orders scarce and crates of unsold tiles piling up across the yard, the company has slowed production and cut working hours, sowing worry and thrift among its workers.

Kim Baker works at a roof tile factory with declining business. “We don’t just hop in the car and go shopping or get something to eat,” he said, with his daughter Bailey and wife, Debbie, right.

Recessionary Signs “We don’t just hop in the car and go shopping or get something to eat,” said Kim Baker, whose take-home pay at the plant has recently dropped to $450 a week, from more than $600. “You’ve got to watch everything. If we go to town now, it’s for a reason.”

Throughout the country, businesses grappling with declining fortunes are cutting hours for those on their payrolls. Self-employed people are suffering a drop in demand for their services, like music lessons, catering and management consulting. Growing numbers of people are settling for part-time work out of a failure to secure a full-time position.

The gradual erosion of the paycheck has become a stealth force driving the American economic downturn. Most of the attention has focused on the loss of jobs and the risk of layoffs. But the less-noticeable shrinking of hours and pay for millions of workers around the country appears to be a bigger contributor to the decline, which has already spread from housing and finance to other important areas of the economy.

While official unemployment has risen only modestly, to 5.1 percent, the reduction of wages and working hours for those still employed has become a primary cause of distress, pushing many more Americans into a downward spiral, economists say.

Moreover, this slippage is a critical indicator that the nation may well be on the verge of a recession, if not already in one.

Last month, the hours worked by those on American payrolls dropped, compared with six months earlier, according to an index maintained by the Labor Department. The last time the index moved into negative territory was February 2001, when the economy was on the doorstep of recession. A similar slide emerged in August 1990, one month into what proved an even more severe downturn.

From March 2007 to March of this year, the average workweek reported in the private sector slipped slightly to 33.8 hours, from 33.9 hours, while overtime for manufacturing workers fell by a larger margin.

At the end of last month, more than 4.9 million people were working part time either because they could not find full-time jobs or because their companies had cut hours in the face of slack business, according to a Labor Department survey. That represented an increase of 400,000 since November.

And on Wednesday, the government reported that average earnings slipped in March after accounting for the rising costs of food and fuel — the sixth consecutive month that pay failed to keep pace with inflation.

Read all of it here. / New York Times / The Rag Blog

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ABC, Barack Obama and the Red Herring

Posted on April 18, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Daley to Clinton: Don’t Tar Obama with Ayers
by Mike Dorning and Rick Pearson / April 17, 2008

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, whose father was famously not so sympathetic to anti-war protesters, is coming to the defense of Barack Obama for his friendship with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers.

Daley accused Hillary Clinton and other critics of Obama’s association with Ayers of “re-fighting 40 year old battles.” And the mayor noted that he, too “know(s) Bill Ayers” and has “worked with” Ayers on city education reforms.

The mayor released the following statement:

“There are a lot of reasons that Americans are angry about Washington politics. And one more example is the way Senator Obama’s opponents are playing guilt-by-association, tarring him because he happens to know Bill Ayers.

“I also know Bill Ayers. He worked with me in shaping our now nationally-renowned school reform program. He is a nationally-recognized distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois/Chicago and a valued member of the Chicago
community.

“I don’t condone what he did 40 years ago but I remember that period well. It was a difficult time, but those days are long over. I believe we have too many challenges in Chicago and our country to keep re-fighting 40 year old battles.”

But the Clinton campaign was not about to drop Ayers connection to Obama. Ayers hosted a neighborhood coffee for Obama’s initial 1996 Illinois state Senate run and gave Obama a $200 donation for his state Senate re-election campaign in 2001.

In a conference call with reporters today, Clinton spokesmen Howard Wolfson and Phil Singer sought to maintain that Obama’s political relationship with Ayers was more important than the decision by Clinton’s husband, President Bill Clinton, to commute the sentences of two of Ayers’ former Weather Underground members, Susan Rosenberg and Linda Evans on terrorist related weapons charges.

Asked if Hillary Clinton had expressed any disagreement with her husband’s actions in commuting the sentences of Rosenberg and Evans, Wolfson said only that he would ask the candidate.

Source. / The Swamp / Chicago Tribune

Dr. William Ayers

The Weather Underground: False Debate
By Joseph A. Palermo

It’s a symptom of the malaise of our times when ABC News during a Democratic presidential debate forces us to discuss a candidate’s relations, when he was 8 years old, to a Chicago legal activist who belonged to a 1969 spin-off group of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which dabbled in “revolutionary” bombings of unoccupied (hopefully) buildings in the early 1970s.

If Hillary Clinton thinks it’s a big deal that Barack Obama has crossed paths with Bill Ayres, (Yes, the guy who is with Bernardine Dorhn). I met Ms. Dorhn and Mr. Ayres when I was a visiting professor at Colgate College in Hamilton, New York, when Nigel Young, then the Director of the Peace Studies Program at Colgate invited his former UC Berkeley classmates to speak about their work providing legal services to the poor in Chicago. It’s no big deal.

Guilt By Association. For George Stephanapolous to bring up Ayres and not talk about the social context of the early 1970s that also brought us the Black Panther Party and other groups is to misconstrue the point of the question.

What’s the point of the question?

And for Hillary Clinton to run with the Ayres/Weather Underground connection betrays her “kitchen sink” philosophy. But, as Barack Obama astutely pointed out, President Bill Clinton pardoned two members of the Weather Underground in any case. And the fact is that the Clintons are of the Weatherman generation and Obama is not. It’s the last gasp of Hillary Clinton’s desperation.

It’s also interesting that a more important and radical organization of the early 1970s, the Black Panther Party, featured Chicago Congressman Bobby Rush as its titular head at the time when the legendary Fred Hampton was the inspirational leader. The irony here is that a former leader of the Black Panther Party, Congressman Bobby Rush, badly defeated Barack Obama in the 2000 Democratic congressional primary. “Taking on Bobby Rush among black voters is like running into a buzz saw,” said Ron Lester, a pollster who worked for Obama during the campaign. “This guy was incredibly popular. Not only that, his support ran deep — to the extent that a lot of people who liked Barack still wouldn’t support him because they were committed to Bobby. He had built up this reserve of goodwill over 25 years in that community.” Obama learned an enormous amount from losing big to Bobby Rush.

Why bring up Bill Ayres and the Weather Underground when Obama was 8 years old, living in Indonesia at the time, and in his first attempt at federal office lost to a former Black Panther? If times have progressed to the point where Bobby Rush is a respected member or Congress, why can’t Bill Ayres and his good legal work he has done for the Chicago community be left alone?

(My thanks, once again, to my friend and colleague Dr. Stan Oden for help on this one.)

Source. / Huffington Post / The Rag Blog

Fact Check on Clinton Attacks on Obama and Ayers
April 17, 2008

REALITY: OBAMA WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD WHEN THE WEATHERMEN WERE ACTIVE

Obama Turned Eight In September 1969, The Days Of Rage Occurred In October 1969. Barack Obama was born on September 4, 1961. He turned eight on September 4, 1969. The Days of Rage, in which William Ayers participated, occurred in October 1969. [Obama Birth Certificate, UPI, 10/21/81]

William Ayers Participated In The “Days Of Rage” In 1969. The AP reported, “In the autumn of 1969, the Weatherman, led by Bernardine Dohrn and Mark Rudd, converged on Chicago and planned a series of demonstrations to dramatize their beliefs. The riots, which came to be known as the “Days of Rage,” caused thousands of dollars in damage in the downtown and Near North Side areas and resulted in injuries to several policemen. Rudd and Ms. Dohrn were named in federal riot indictments with ten others — William Ayers, Kathy Boudin, John Jacobs, Jeff Jones, Michael Spiegel, Howard Machtinger, Terry Robins, Lawrence Weiss, Linda Sue Evans and Judy Clark. Another prominent activist, Cathy Wilkerson, was arrested on state charges of mob action and resisting a police officer. Some surrendered years ago. Two — Ms. Dohrn and Ayers, son of the former chairman of Commonweath Edison Co. — surfaced Wednesday. Charges against Ayers had been dropped in 1978 but Ms. Dohrn still faces charges of aggravated battery and jumping bail.” [AP, 12/3/80]

REALITY: AYERS CONNECTION IS “PHONY,” TENUOUS,” “A STRETCH”

Chicago Sun Times: Obama’s Connection To Ayers Is A “Phony Flap”. The Chicago Sun-Times wrote in an editorial, “But Ayers, it is also true to say, has since followed in the footsteps of the great Chicago social worker Jane Addams, crusading for education and juvenile justice reform. His 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court, has been praised for exposing how Cook County’s juvenile justice system all but eliminates a child’s chance for redemption. Is Barack Obama consorting with a radical? Hardly. Ayers is nothing more than an aging lefty with a foolish past who is doing good. And while, yes, Obama is friendly with Ayers, it appears to be only in the way of two community activists whose circles overlap. Obama’s middle name is Hussein. That doesn’t make him an Islamic terrorist. He stopped wearing a flag pin. That doesn’t make him unpatriotic. And he’s friendly with UIC Professor William Ayers. That doesn’t make him a bomb thrower. Time to move on to Phony Flap 6,537,204.” [Chicago Sun-Times, 3/3/08]

Washington Post: Obama-Ayers Link “Is A Tenuous One.” The Washington Post reported in a fact check, “But the Obama-Ayers link is a tenuous one. As Newsday pointed out, Clinton has her own, also tenuous, Weatherman connection. Her husband commuted the sentences of a couple of convicted Weather Underground members, Susan Rosenberg and Linda Sue Evans, shortly before leaving office in January 2001. Which is worse: pardoning a convicted terrorist or accepting a campaign contribution from a former Weatherman who was never convicted?” [Washington Post, 2/18/08]

Woods Fund President Harrington: “This Whole Connection Is A Stretch.” The Washington Post reported in a fact check, “Whatever his past, Ayers is now a respected member of the Chicago intelligentsia, and still a member of the Woods Fund Board. The president of the Woods Fund, Deborah Harrington, said he had been selected for the board because of his solid academic credentials and ‘passion for social justice.’ ‘This whole connection is a stretch,’ Harrington told me. ‘Barack was very well known in Chicago, and a highly respected legislator. It would be difficult to find people round here who never volunteered or contributed money to one of his campaigns.'” [Washington Post, 2/18/08]

Noam Scheiber Of TNR: “I Don’t See Evidence Of Any Relationship” Between Obama And Ayers. Noam Scheiber of The New Republic wrote, “Ben says Ayers and Obama were, at best, casual friends. Even that seems to overstate things, though. I don’t see evidence of any relationship. The only concrete connection we know of is the meeting, which was attended by a number of local liberals; their contemporaneous membership on the board of a local organization; and a $200-donation by Ayers to one of Obama’s state senate campaigns. (Obama also once praised something Ayers had written about the juvenile justice system.) I’m not saying they couldn’t have been casual friends; just that there isn’t much evidence for that at this point.” [The New Republic, 2/22/08]

Birdsell: Obama Links To Ayers Were “Pretty Slender Ties.” The New York Sun reported, “‘Those are pretty slender ties to a controversial figure,’ the dean of Baruch College’s School of Public Affairs, David Birdsell, said of Mr. Obama’s links to Mr. Ayers.” [New York Sun, 2/19/08]

RHETORIC: He was then asked about his association with William Ayers, a member of the Weather Underground, a radical group from the 1960s and ’70s. Ayers was quoted after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as saying he did not regret setting bombs and that “we didn’t do enough.” [Washington Post, 4/17/08]

REALITY: AYERS COMMENTS WERE PUBLISHED ON SEPTEMBER 11; THE INTERVIEW OCCURRED PRIOR TO PUBLICATION

On September 11, 2001, A Story About William Ayers’ Memoir Was Published In The New York Times; The Interview Occurred Prior To Publication. “‘I don’t regret setting bombs,’ Bill Ayers said. ‘I feel we didn’t do enough.’ Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970’s as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago.” [New York Times, 9/11/01]

AYERS IS A TENURED PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO AND WAS A “RESPECTED ADVISOR” TO MAYOR DALEY ON SCHOOL REFORM

Ayers Is A Professor Of Education At UIC. According to his website at UIC, “William Ayers is a school reform activist, Distinguished Professor of Education, and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he teaches courses in interpretive research, urban school change, and youth and the modern predicament. He is the founder of the Center for Youth and Society and founder and co-director of the Small Schools Workshop. A graduate of the Bank Street College of Education and Teachers College, Columbia University, he has written extensively about social justice, democracy and education. His interests focus on the political and cultural contexts of schooling as well as the meaning and ethical purposes of teachers, students, and families.” [Ayers UIC Site, Ayers Personal Site, Accessed 5/31/07]

Ayers Advised Chicago Mayor Richard Daley On School Reform Issues. Bill “Ayers is now mainstream — an educator with distinguished professor status. He has written three books about education and has advised Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley on the subject of school reform.” [AP, 10/14/01]

Terkel: Ayers Is A “Sensitive And Gifted” Writer And Teacher. Studs Terkel wrote, “William Ayers is as sensitive and gifted a chronicler as he is a teacher.” [Beacon]

AYERS AND DOHRN BECAME RESPECTABLE FIXTURES OF THE MAINSTREAM IN CHICAGO

Bill Ayers And Bernadine Dohrn “Became Respectable Fixtures In Mainstream Liberal Chicago Years Ago.” Alexander Cockburn wrote in and op-ed for the Las Vegas Review Journal, “Late last week, the Clinton campaign was leaking stories about support for Obama from the former Weather Underground couple Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, both of whom became respectable fixtures in mainstream liberal Chicago years ago.” [Las Vegas Review Journal, 3/2/08]

CHARGES AGAINST AYERS WERE DROPPED AND HE SERVED NO TIME

1979: Charges Against Ayers Were Dropped Because “The Government’s Case Was Based On Illegal Wiretaps.” The New York Times reported, “William Ayers was a fugitive, too, for nine of those years, but the Federal charges against him, Miss Dohrn and other members of the revolutionary organization were dropped in 1979, when it was ruled that the Government’s case was based on illegal wiretaps.” [New York Times, 12/5/80]

Ayers “Served No Time.” “William Ayers: Surrendered and pleaded guilty in 1980 to possession of explosives and served no time. Teaches early childhood development at the University of Illinois.” [Boston Globe, 9/19/93]

Source. / BarackObama.org / The Rag Blog
Also see Frameshop: Framing Obama as Violent – Et Tu? ABC.

Also on The Rag Blog: ABC takes hits for slanted, tabloid debate.

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According to Form

Posted on April 18, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

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Real Power Can Be Manifest Through Our Spending

Posted on April 18, 2008 by RagBlog

The Most Powerful People in America
By Joel S. Hirschhorn / April 16, 2008

They are not the rich and superrich, nor the politically powerful running the two-party plutocracy, nor the greedy heads of banking and finance companies, and certainly not the media moguls and bloviating pundits.

The most powerful people are US, American consumers that account for over 70 percent of the economy. It is exactly now, when the economy is in the toilet, that consumers hold the maximum power. So why are we the people still deluding ourselves that the path to a better future rests on electing a new president?

We are suckers, conditioned by decades of clever marketing and advertising to believe the lies of politicians, and worst of all to believe that elections and our votes provide us with power. Wrong. Our real power can only be manifest through our spending dollars.

The overwhelming majority of Americans have been severely damaged by economic oppression by government policies that have produced historic economic inequality. Yet, despite revolting conditions, Americans seem unwilling to revolt by using their remaining economic power. They have let themselves become economic slaves.

What is amazing and depressing is that there are no national leaders from the worlds of politics, religion, education, media or public interest that are attempting to harness consumer power at this critical time. No one is capturing the public’s attention by making it crystal clear that consumers could obtain any political or economic reform in the public interest by joining together to withhold their discretionary spending.

Where are the anti-Iraq war leaders? Why are they not shouting about forcing an immediate commitment to ending the Iraq war by using the power of a massive consumer boycott that clearly could destroy the whole economy? Tell President Bush that consumers will greatly curb their spending for a month to give him time to implement a plan for withdrawal from Iraq. Make it clear that the coming federal rebates will not be used for spending. Make it clear that Bush inaction will result in continuation of the boycott.

Where is Ralph Nader, the ultimate consumer advocate? Why is he not proclaiming the brilliance of a consumer boycott as the winning tactic to force effective government assistance to the millions of Americans screwed by the sub-prime mortgage fiasco and about the lose their homes?

Where is Barack Obama, who supposedly wants to produce change? Rather than putting all his energy into satisfying his egoistic hunt for the presidency, why is he not talking about harnessing consumer power right now to get political reforms, like .ending trade agreements that are destroying the middle class? Why does he not send a clear message to his million-plus contributors to join a national consumer boycott to obtain immediate concessions from the Bush administration?

Where are the professors who have published books making the case for a second constitutional convention as the way to restore American democracy? Not one has the courage to say that the way to get Congress to obey Article V of the Constitution and convene that the first Article V convention is by American consumers threatening to plunge a dagger into the heart of American business.

Now is the time for all the millions of Americans that make up the 81 percent who see the nation on the wrong track to take action, to think like patriotic revolutionaries and take the power that now only exists with their spending. Sounds simple. All this strategy needs is leadership. Rather than spending so much time and energy on the media-hyped presidential campaign, we the people should demand that someone step forward to inform and mobilize consumers to become powerful citizens by using their spending as the ultimate populist political weapon.

Joel S. Hirschhorn can be reached through delusionaldemocracy.com. He is a co-founder of Friends of the Article V Convention at http://www.foavc.org/.

Source / Information Clearing House / The Rag Blog

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Proof of Murder, Rape, and Torture in US Custody

Posted on April 18, 2008 by RagBlog

Documents Describe Murder And Torture Of Prisoners In U.S. Custody: Newly Released Government Documents Show Special Forces Used Illegal Interrogation Techniques In Afghanistan

April 17, 2008

NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union obtained documents today from the Department of Defense confirming the military’s use of unlawful interrogation methods on detainees held in U.S. custody in Afghanistan. The documents from the military’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID), obtained as a result of the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, include the first on-the-ground reports of torture in Gardez, Afghanistan to be publicly released.

“These documents make it clear that the military was using unlawful interrogation techniques in Afghanistan,” said Amrit Singh, an attorney with the ACLU. “Rather than putting a stop to these systemic abuses, senior officials appear to have turned a blind eye to them.”

Special Operations officers in Gardez admitted to using what are known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) techniques, which for decades American service members experienced as training to prepare for the brutal treatment they might face if captured.

Today’s documents reveal charges that Special Forces beat, burned, and doused eight prisoners with cold water before sending them into freezing weather conditions. One of the eight prisoners, Jamal Naseer, died in U.S. custody in March 2003. In late 2004, the military opened a criminal investigation into charges of torture at Gardez. Despite numerous witness statements describing the evidence of torture, the military’s investigation concluded that the charges of torture were unsupported. It also concluded that Naseer’s death was the result of a “stomach ailment,” even though no autopsy had been conducted in his case. Documents uncovered today also refer to sodomy committed by prison guards; the victims’ identities are redacted.

“These documents raise serious questions about the adequacy of the military’s investigations into prisoner abuse,” added Singh.

The ACLU also obtained today a file today related to the death of Muhammad Al Kanan, a prisoner held at Camp Bucca in Iraq. The file reveals that British doctors refused to issue a death certificate for fear of being sued for malpractice: www.aclu.org/pdfs/safefree/20080416/CID_ROI_Bucca.pdf

In October 2003, the ACLU – along with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense, and Veterans for Peace – filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for records concerning the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody abroad. To date, more than 100,000 pages of government documents have been released in response to the ACLU’s FOIA lawsuit.

Attorneys in the FOIA case are Lawrence S. Lustberg and Melanca D. Clark of the New Jersey-based law firm Gibbons, P.C.; Jameel Jaffer, Singh and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU; Arthur Eisenberg and Beth Haroules of the New York Civil Liberties Union; and Shayana Kadidal and Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

In addition, many of the FOIA documents are also located and summarized in a recently published book by Jaffer and Singh, Administration of Torture. More information is available online at: www.aclu.org/administrationoftorture

The documents received in the ACLU’s FOIA litigation are online at: www.aclu.org/torturefoia

All of today’s documents are available at: www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/34922res20080416.html

Source / Information Clearing House / The Rag Blog

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An Act of Arrogance, Not Patriotism

Posted on April 18, 2008 by RagBlog


Justice O’Connor, I Think I Love You
By Lynn Grossman / April 16, 2008

Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Steven Breyer were at Hunter College the other evening talking about “The Supreme Court and the Presidency.” The event was held in the Danny Kaye Theater (“The jurist who is purest has the ruling on the schooling, but the judge who holds the grudge has a tort that is fraught?”) which sits about 600 people. The place was packed.

[snip]

Supreme Court justices, current or retired, are not known to talk about cases in public. They rarely, if ever, criticize the current administration. So many of us in the audience were surprised when, unprompted, Justice O’Connor turned the discussion to the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Guantanamo detainees, a ruling that found the military commissions the Bush administration put in place at Guantanamo Bay violated both U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions.

Justice O’Connor explained that, while the Supreme Court can rule on cases, it has no power to enforce its own ruling. For that, the court relies entirely on the Executive Branch. And even though the Court had ruled Guantanamo was illegal, the Executive Branch — Bush’s White House — had still not enforced the court’s findings. Detainees were still imprisoned; the machinery for hearings had not even been put in place.

Justice O’Connor was clearly not happy about this. To hear remarks like hers from a conservative justice, the very justice who had, in effect, handed the Presidency to George Bush with her vote on Bush v Gore in 2000, was nothing short of stunning.

Justice Breyer amplified her comments, raising the 1832 case of Worcester v Georgia where Chief Justice John Marshall ruled the Cherokee Indians were entitled to federal protection from state governments which were trying to kick them off their land. President Jackson refused to honor the court’s findings, saying, “John Marshall made his decision. Now let him enforce it,” and sent American troops to remove the Cherokees from Georgia, leading to the infamous Trail of Tears.

Breyer offered a second example, this time of an Executive Branch willing to enforce a Supreme Court ruling in spite of personal or political beliefs, President Eisenhower’s desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock in 1957. Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus would not accept the Supreme Court’s ruling on Brown v Board of Education and called out the state’s National Guard to block entry to the school. Eisenhower personally favored segregation, but felt honor-bound as President to respect the Court, no matter his personal beliefs. He not only federalized Faubus’ National Guard, putting them under his control, he also deployed the 101st Airborne Division, heroes of the recent Normandy Invasion, to lead the students into the school, a symbolic gesture well understood by post-WWII Americans.

A President putting the law of the land above his own agenda — now there’s an old-fashioned notion.

Presidents are sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States, not just the parts of it they like. Bush calls himself a patriot, but dragging your feet so you don’t have to enforce a Supreme Court ruling is an act of arrogance, not patriotism.

When Supreme Court Justices are so disheartened and frustrated by a President’s refusal to enforce the law they are compelled to speak out publicly, it’s a dismal indication of the dispiriting political climate in which we live.

Read all of it here. / Huffington Post

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