The Rag Blog

It was the … No! 2007 was never the best of times. It was a whiny, fretful twelve months, and what should have been a time of keen enjoyment, poking at the graying ashes of the Bush era, saw the left and progressive sectors grasping at phantoms and with less of a significant presence on the national political scene than at any time in the past thirty years. There’s scant sign that this will change in 2008 unless some unforeseen earthquake tosses up some exciting Independent candidacies, of which there is zero evidence at the turn of the year.

January 1, 2007

The world still reels from the fall of a titan. A week earlier, on December 26, Gerald Ford entered Valhalla on his golf cart.

These days a hefty slab of the teenagers alive in America will supposedly live to be 100 (presumably working till they drop to pay for the rest, jobless and dying from diabetes). Given the reproductive shadow hanging over America – poor semen quality, cryptorchidism, impaired fecundity – they won’t have that many children, although the sparse litters will contain people likely to live to be 125, handing down horrible recipes for turkey giblet gravy to the next generation.

In short, there’ll be a lot of centenarians about, and the name Gerald Ford will mean absolutely nothing to any of them. You had to have been born in 1960 to have been 14 in 1974, hence even vaguely conscious of the genial interregnum between Nixon and Carter, over which Ford presided.

At the start of the first viewing day, so the wires services reported, only twenty people were mustered at Capitol Hill to view Ford’s casket in the Rotunda. On that day, George Bush excused himself from the state memorial, staying home in Crawford, Texas, presumably watching reruns of Saddam’s execution.

Few speak well of Ford. The neocons think he was weak. The libertarians regard him as a statist. The liberals and the left can’t get over his pardon of Nixon. Enthusiasts for the man from Grand Rapids seem pretty much confined to Dick Cheney and me.

On the grounds that he didn’t have the time and maybe not even the inclination to do too much harm, I’ve always regarded Ford as America’s greatest twentieth-century president, with the possible exception of Warren Harding, a very fine man. Ford reached the White House without vote fraud. He presided over a Keynesian binge. On his benign watch the pork barrel did its noble duty. Nonmilitary appropriations rose by 7.2 per cent, in contrast to Nixon’s 4.3, Carter’s 2.2, Reagan’s 1.3. On his watch, with funding cut off by congress, the U.S. quit Vietnam. The arts flourished. Yes, there was the little matter of the invasion of East Timor. Nobody, certainly no American president, is perfect. Ford probably thought East Timor was a putting green. Anyway, what does it take to be America’s greatest President, if it comes down to the height of the mountain of corpses you leave behind? The bar isn’t that high.

Ford belonged to the age of détente. The neoliberal age and the Second Cold War really began with Carter. Had Ford beaten back Carter’s challenge in 1976, the neocon crusades of the mid- to late 1970s would have been blunted by the mere fact of a Republican occupying the White House. Reagan, most likely, would have returned permanently to his slumbers in California after his abortive challenge to Ford for the nomination in Kansas in 1976.

January 7

The war in Iraq, one of the most disastrous military enterprises in the history of the Republic, has the New York Times’ fingerprints all over it. Across the past sixth months, the Times has been waging an equally disingenuous campaign to escalate American troop levels in this doomed enterprises, culminating in an editorial okay for a troop hike the day before Bush’s speech.

The prime journalistic promoter of the escalation–it is time to retire the adroitly chosen word “surge”–now being proposed by the White House is Michael Gordon, the Times’ military correspondent, a man of fabled arrogance and self esteem.

A long piece on January 2, under the byline of Gordon, John Burns and David Sanger, made these promotion efforts particularly clear. The piece was a prolonged attack on Gen. George Casey, top military commander in Baghdad, depicted in harsh terms as espousing a defeatist plan of orderly withdrawal.

Gordon’s “troop surge” campaign has been politically much more influential than the mad-dog ravings of the right-wing broadcasters. The Times helped furnish the 2003 U.S. attack on Iraq. Now it has played a major role in furnishing a likely escalation. There is blood on its hands, and grieving mothers like Cindy Sheehan have as much cause to demonstrate outside its offices as outside Bush’s ranch in Crawford.

January 11

A make-or-break speech by a beleaguered U.S. President is usually preceded by a demonstration of American might somewhere on the planet, and the run-up to Bush’s address last night was no exception.

The AC-130 gunship that massacred a convoy of fleeing Islamists on Somalia’s southwestern border, apparently along with dozens of nomads, their families and livestock, was deployed on Sunday to make timely newspaper headlines indicative of Bush’s determination to strike at terror wherever it may lurk. Moral to nomads: when the U.S. president schedules a speech, don’t herd, don’t go to wedding parties, head for the nearest cave.

President Bush stuck to his expected script last night and said he plans to boost U.S. forces in Iraq by 4,000 Marines to Anbar province and five combat brigades–17,500 troops–to Baghdad, in a new scheme to regain control of the city.

Perhaps it was the shift of setting for his broadcast to the White House library that made him seem uncomfortable. With the exception of Laura, the former librarian, the Bush clan is not a bookish lot. The late Brendan Gill reported after staying at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine how he scoured the premises late one night in search of something to read and could only find The Fart Book.

January 18

Suppose the movers and shakers in the Israel lobby in the U.S.A.–Abe Foxman, Alan Dershowitz and the rest of the crew–had simply decided to leave Jimmy Carter’s Peace Not Apartheid alone. How long before the book and all its aspersions on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians would have been gathering dust on the remainder shelves?

Suppose even that Dershowitz had rounded up some interns, and simply sallied forth from the Harvard Law School to buy up every copy of Carter’s book and toss each one into the Charles River. Would not that have been a more successful suppressor than the attempted blitzkrieg strategy they did adopt?

Of course it would. For weeks now the lobby has hurled its legions into battle against Carter. The Anti-Defamation League has taken out ads. The lobby’s allies in the press have hurled their rotten tomatoes. The Amazon.com book site features venomous assaults at unprecedented length.

Carter has been stigmatized as an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, a patron of former concentration camp killers, a Christian madman, a pawn of the Arabs, an advocate of terror.

But the assault on Carter is all to no avail. With each gust of abuse, Carter’s book soars higher and higher on the bestseller lists, now at number three on Amazon itself. This doesn’t prove the lobby has no power. It proves the lobby can be dumb. Once a book by a former President with weighty humanitarian credentials has actually made it into the bookstores, it’s a hard job to shoot it down with volleys of wild abuse.

January 24

The Bush presidency is finished. A State of the Union address is always a pitiless register of where exactly the White House incumbent stands, in terms of political power. As Bush plodded through a list of doomed political initiatives the news cameras kept swiveling away from him, like people seeking escape from a bore at a cocktail party.

They peered over his shoulder at Nancy Pelosi, America’s first female Speaker of the House; they swiveled up to the balcony at a haggard-looking Laura Bush; they sought out the Democratic presidential hopefuls, such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. A first-timer at this annual event might have thought Bush was doing well, as the politicians and judges and generals bobbed up and down with the usual ovations. But the reactions were dutiful and the mood low-key.

Bush stepped to the rostrum shackled to polling numbers that put him at the third lowest presidential ratings on record. He has the approval of only 28 per cent of the people, still hovering above Carter’s 26 per cent in 1979, in the late autumn of his term, and Nixon’s 24 per cent shortly before he resigned.

The least enthusiastic people in the chamber were probably members of Bush’s own party, who see him as an unalloyed political liability.

When a president who came to maturity making daily obeisance to west Texas starts hailing biodiesel and mumbling about grass clippings as alternative energy, you know it’s all over; that the President’s policy advisers and speech writers are already sending out their resumes and wondering when to jump ship.

February 1

Aside from winning, there aren’t that many ways of ending wars. Governments pay attention when the troops mutiny, when there are riots outside the recruiting offices, when there’s revolution on the home front, when the money runs out.

So, here we are, in 2007, coming up on four years of war in Iraq. There’s not going to be any significant mutiny among the troops. These people are volunteers. The campuses are quiet, filled with people on career track or downloading music or playing at virtual politics through their laptops. The churches? They are out there protesting torture, but the vocations are dying. We need more nuns! The priests are either on the run or in prison for child abuse.

The respectable old anti-war “movement” stirs into once in a while for pleasant outings like last Saturday’s in Washington, D.C. The people don’t like the war but this doesn’t mean it won’t go on so long as there’s money to pay for it.

This brings us to Congress. There are the powder-puff non-binding resolutions, which mean nothing. On January 26, even as Senator Joe Biden and the others were solemnly pontificating on the significance of their sense-of-the senate resolution against the war, the Senate confirmed, unanimously, 81-0, the nomination of General Petraeus to command U.S. troops in Iraq. Petraeus has been a leading military advocate of escalation in troop levels.

In September 2006, Congress passed the fiscal 2007 defense appropriations act, containing $70 billion for war. Since Oct. 1, it’s what Bush has been using for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That money will run out somewhere between March and May. In past years, the DoD has shifted money around inside the existing budget till a new supplemental is passed.

So right now Bush has money he needs to surge. The White House is sending Congress the entire half trillion defense budget for FY 2008, starting October 1. Congress could cut Iraq spending from this too. Bush could only veto the entire bill.

If there is to be a real battle in Congress over denying Bush money, this is how it will have to take place over the next few months. I doubt the Resistance in Iraq is betting on it.

February 25

The Clintons have always had short fuses, and at the best of times, Hillary is taut by disposition, and already her political prospects for winning the Democratic nomination are getting somewhat cloudier. This last week has been a trying one, crowned by the Oscar-night adulation for Al Gore, no favorite of the Clintons.

On the heels of his $1.3 m. fundraiser for Hillary’s rival, Illinois Senator Barrack Obama, Hollywood tycoon and Dreamworks co-founder David Geffen planted a carefully improvised explosive device under HRC’s candidacy.

He confided to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times that Mrs. Clinton was not the candidate to unify the Democratic Party, nor the nation; also that he would never forgive her husband for ignoring his own appeals and those of many other liberals to give a White House pardon to Leonard Peltier, a native American convicted of killing two FBI agents back in the 1970s. But while leaving Peltier to rot in prison, Clinton did pardon financier Marc Rich.

Geffen’s aim was true. Even though they enjoy political candidates tearing each other to shreds, Americans prefer to have the carnage tricked out with worthy appeals for “unity” and “bipartisanship.” The word “divisive” is a deadly one to have hung around one’s neck. And for many, Rich’s pardon was the quintessential resume of Clintonian corruption.

This, and the Oscar triumph for Gore, have left Mrs. Clinton distinctly frayed. But she is defiant. Asked about her vote for the war at a New Hampshire town hall, she said: “If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from.” Hillary’s numbers are not as robust as they were. She had better learn how to smile under fire, or she’ll soon be in real trouble.

March 8

It’s wheels-up from George Bush today as he heads south for a six-day tour of Latin America. Few Americans study the travel brochures with more zeal than two-term presidents who face impeachment (Nixon and Clinton) or popular loathing (Johnson and Bush Jr.) or displeasing suggestions in the press that they are senile and should be removed from office (Eisenhower and Reagan).

Washington holds scant appeal for our current president. Vice President Dick Cheney’s senior aide Scooter Libby has now been convicted. The hoped-for “light at the end of the tunnel” in Iraq is not yet visible and the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon have threatened mutiny if Bush orders them to bomb Tehran.

His poll ratings are in the basement. So, it was time to call up Lame Duck Tours and accept the bargain offer of a six-day special to Latin America, meals and hotels included with a trip to Mayan ruins on Tuesday.

Back in his 2000 campaign, Bush pledged “a fundamental commitment” to Latin America. But on Bush’s inept watch the subcontinent has swerved left, and now the dominant leader on the continent is Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. The boom in oil prices has allowed Chavez to subsidize energy prices through Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean, and he has cemented important trade and investment agreements with Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia.

The deeper problem is that the U.S. model–free trade pacts, neoliberal onslaughts on public ownership and rule by the International Monetary Fund–simply ran out of steam at the end of the Nineties, leaving Latin America scarred by poverty, unemployment, slums and kleptocracies.

March 12

Until recently, the U.S. people were thinking mainly about the circumstances of Anna Nicole Smith’s demise and the likely inheritor of the former Playmate’s millions. Now Anna has been swept off the front pages, along with the beleaguered Alberto Gonzales, by the pet food crisis.

An ever-lengthening list of proprietary brands of dog and cat food all come from the same Canadian pet food processor, Menu Foods, into whose vats at some point went wheat gluten from China contaminated by melamine, a fertilizer used in Asia where–not to put too fine a point on it–pet life is cheap.

Only a few animals have died, and America’s cats and dogs are at greater risk from lightning strikes, but most Americans are fearfully eyeing Towser and Mittens for signs of renal failure.

Into this firestorm of national anguish now has been tossed the news that Mrs. Judi Giuliani was once in the dog-killing business. This disclosure came on the heels of the news that Judi had not been entirely forthcoming about the number of her legal unions. Like Rudy himself, it turns out she’s on her third.

The hitherto undisclosed numero uno, whom she married at age 19, was a salesman at U.S. Surgical, a company selling surgical staples. Young Judi’s job was allegedly to demonstrate their efficacy on cuts made on drugged dogs.

According to Patricia Feral, president of the Connecticut-based Friends of Animals, quoted on the New York Post online, which broke the story, earlier this week, U.S. Surgical’s reps did sales-demonstration stapling on hundreds of dogs through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Feral says the dogs were “either put to death following the sales demonstrations because they can’t recover from them, or they die during them.” The stapling had to be done on live dogs because, as one U.S. Surgical CEO put it back in the 1980s, “A dead dog doesn’t bleed. You need real blood-flow conditions, or you get a false sense of security.”

Americans like their First Family to have a dog. Nixon used to put sesame seeds in the turn-ups of his trousers so his spaniel, King Timahoe, would nuzzle him in public. “Any man who does not like dogs and not want them about does not deserve to be in the White House,” said President Calvin Coolidge.

April 14

Like many of the heehaw racists strewn across the cable dial and AM frequencies, Don Imus must be wondering why this time he got his tongue caught in the wringer. It was suddenly news that Imus shored up his ratings with racist cracks at blacks and Hispanics? Only at the start of April he went too far by insulting the women athletes of Rutgers? Is that when he crossed the Rubicon of racism and the shout went up, At long last, have you left no sense of decency? It’s like announcing Bluebeard veered into unforgivable moral excess when he knocked off wife number five.

When he realized he was in serious trouble, Imus went full steam into contrition mode. America, far more than other cultures, adores full-bore apologies, leading to a full, low-interest-rate moral re-fi. Not believing in redemption, and schooled by Spinoza and Nietzsche, Europeans tend to take the position that remorse adds to the crime.

Imus’s trip to Canossa on the Reverend Al Sharpton’s radio program was a particularly rich session, with Imus sniveling that at bottom he is “a good man” and Reverend Al ushering on his daughter as a symbol of black womanhood defiled by Imus’s “ho” talk. Imus could have probed the Rev. about his explicit statement on CNN a couple of years ago, amid his campaign to get rappers using physical violence to promote records banned from the airwaves for 90-day punitive periods, that these rappers had a perfect (First amendment) right to rap about violence and presumably hos. But Imus passed up the chance, preferring to dwell on his war on sickle cell anemia, a disease he appeared to think he had the courage and moral stamina to confront in his ranch in New Mexico. This culminated in another wonderful exchange, this one between Imus and Brian Monroe of Ebony:

MONROE: All right. Let me be clear. My magazine, Ebony magazine, has been writing and covering sickle cell anemia for decades now. Back when you were still doing radio spots for used cars. I cannot let you….

A used car salesman! Amidst his abasement, the worm turned.

IMUS: I’m not going to sit here and let you insult me. Don’t talk about me doing used car commercials Let me tell you what–I will bet you I have slept in a house with more black children who were not related to me than you have.

In the end it was all to no avail. The execs at MSNBC and at CBS, saw the big advertisers peel away, and instantly threw in the towel. Imus was history–at least until he gets a show on Sirius.

And in the larger context of things–of Anne Coulter, of O’Reilly the Loofah King, of Limbaugh, of Howard Stern, of Cynthia Tucker and Juan Williams; of blacks paid by whites to dump on other blacks like Cynthia McKinney, of Chris Rock chanting the F word, of women-dissing rapper? One listens to the fuss about Imus and thinks, okay — but this is only one tiny square in our dirty national quilt. We live in a racist, profit-driven culture that is getting more degraded by the hour. War is at the apex of that degradation, and indeed these ceremonies of degradation are an integral part of the war machine, which drives the whole show along. Back in February Imus snarled into his mike, “It might be good to start with somebody who is willing to take three big ones and drop one on Mecca, one on Jeddah and one on Saudi-one on Riyadh.” No one asked him to apologize for that one. Take that, you towel heads.

April 19

Since there undoubtedly will be a next time, after these latest campus killings at Virginia Tech, what useful counsel on preventative measures can we offer faculties across America?

Arm teachers and students. There have been the usual howls from the anti-gun lobby, but it’s all hot air. America is not about to dump the Second Amendment giving people the right to bear arms.

A better idea would be for appropriately screened teachers and maybe student monitors to carry weapons. This is not as bizarre as it may sound to European ears. A quarter of a century ago students doing military ROTC training regularly carried rifles around campus.

Five years ago Peter Odighizuwa, a 43-year-old Nigerian student, killed three faculty members at Appalachian Law School with a handgun, but before he could wreak further carnage two students fetched weapons from their cars, challenged the murderer with guns leveled, and disarmed him.

Ban anti-depressants. What should be banned from campuses are not weapons but prescriptions for anti-depressants. Cho Seung-hui was on a prescription drug. The likelihood of it being an anti-depressant is high, since campus doctors dispense prescriptions for them like confetti.

Replace campus police with student volunteers. The stupidity of the campus cops at Virginia Tech will undoubtedly cost the college hefty damages.

There was plenty of evidence that Cho Seung-hui was a time bomb waiting to explode. Students talked about him as a possible shooter and refused to take classes with him. His essays so disturbed one of his teachers with their violent ravings that she arranged a secret signal in case she needed security during her tutorials.

When the mass murder session began in the engineering building the police cowered behind their cruisers until Cho Seung-hui finished off the last batch of his 32 victims, then killed himself. Then the police bravely rushed in and started sticking their guns in the faces of the traumatised students, screaming at them to freeze or be shot.

Make laxity in supervision grounds for termination. More than one teacher felt Cho was scarily nuts. They recommended counseling, then didn’t bother to review the conclusions. And it has emerged that Cho was actually institutionalized as a psychotic and suicide risk in 2005. Yet when he returned to campus the administrators didn’t even tip off his roommate.

College administrators live in constant fear of declining students’ enrollment. At the first sign of trouble they cover up. So, there’s a double killing in a Virginia Tech dorm at 7.15am, after which Cho has time to go home, make his final home video, walk to the post office, mail his package to NBC and then head off to the engineering building with his guns.

The college’s first email to students goes out more than two hours after the first killings were discovered. The ineffable Warren Steger, college president, says later: “You can only make decisions based on the information you have on the time. You don’t have hours to reflect on it.” Two dead bodies, a killer somewhere on campus, and Steger makes his big decision to do nothing.

May 3

By far the best performance at the recent Democratic candidates’ debate organized by MSNBC was by a very distant outsider, Mike Gravel, a 77-year-old former U.S. senator from Alaska, well known nearly 40 years ago for his opposition to the war in Vietnam. In some electrifying tirades, he flayed Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and the others as two-faced on the absolute imperative of getting out of the war in Iraq and not getting into one in Iran. “They frighten me”, Gravel shouted, gesturing at his rivals. “You know what’s worse than one U.S. soldier dying in vain in Iraq. It’s two soldiers dying in vain. In Vietnam they all died in vain.”

May 15

Enter the world of Paul Krugman, a world either dark (the eras of Bush One and Bush Two), or bathed in light (when Bill was king). Across the past three years, Krugman has become the Democrats’ Clark Kent. A couple of times each week he bursts onto the New York Times op-ed in his blue jumpsuit, shoulders aside the Geneva Conventions and whacks the bad guys. For an economist, he writes pretty good basic English. He lays about him with simple words like “liar,” as applied to the Bush crowd, from the president on down. He makes liberals feel good, the way William Safire returned right-wingers their sense of self-esteem after Watergate.

Krugman paints himself as a homely Will Rogers type, speakin’ truth to the power elite from his virtuous perch far outside the Beltway: “Why did I see what others failed to see?” he asks, apropos his swiftness in pinning the Liars label on the Bush administration. “I’m not part of the gang,” he answers. “I work from central New Jersey, and continue to live the life of a college professor–so I never bought into the shared assumptions I don’t need to be in the good graces of top officials, so I also have no need to display the deference that characterizes many journalists.”

All of which is self-serving hooey. The homely perch is Princeton. Krugman shares, with no serious demur, all the central assumptions of the neoliberal creed that has governed the prime institutions of the world capitalist system for the past generation and driven much of the world deeper, ever deeper into extreme distress. The unseemly deference he shows Clinton’s top officials could be simply, if maliciously explained by his probable hope that one day, perhaps not to long delayed in the event of a Democratic administration taking over in 2005, he may be driving his buggy south down the New Jersey turnpike towards a powerful position of the sort he has certainly entertained hopes of in the past.

June 1

America right now is “anti-war,” in the sense that about two-thirds of the people think the war in Iraq is a bad business and the troops should come home. Anti-war sentiment was a major factor in the success of the Democrats in last November’s elections, when they recaptured Congress. The irony is that this sharp disillusion of the voters with America’s occupation of Iraq owes almost nothing to any anti-war movement. To say the anti-war movement is dead would be an overstatement. But in comparison to kindred movements in the 1960s and early 1970s, or to the struggles against Reagan’s wars in Central America in the late 1980s, it is certainly inert.

The anti-war movement proved itself incapable of pressuring House Democrats to hold out. After the Bush veto, the Democratic resistance has crumbled. The Democrats’ reward for this shameful collapse? Perceived now as fraudulent in their claims to oppose the war, their standing in the polls is as low as Bush’s. Latest news is that the American military presence in Iraq will double by the end of the year.

Do anti-war “movements” end wars? The Vietnam War ended primarily because the Vietnamese defeated the Americans, and because a huge number of U.S. troops were in open mutiny. At home, a large sector of the society was in mutiny too. Anti-war movements are often most significant in their afterlife–schooling a new generation in attitudes and tactics of resistance. What’s happened here in the U.S.A. across the intervening years since Vietnam is a steady, unsurprising decline in the left’s overall political confidence and ambition and, as in the 1990s, a disastrous failure to attack the Democratic Party and Democratic administration led by Clinton and Gore for the onslaught on Yugoslavia and the inhumane sanctions against Iraq.

In the Bush years, we’ve seen a further decline in any independent left with any unified theoretical and practical strategy or even political theory; also a rise in unconstructive and indeed demobilizing paranoia, as in the orgy of 9/11 conspiracism. The campuses are sedate. The labor movement is reeling. To describe the anti-war movement in its effective form is really to mention a few good efforts such as the anti-recruitment campaigns, the tours by those who have lost children in Iraq, or three or four brave souls like Cindy Sheehan, who single-handedly reanimated the anti-war movement last year, commencing with her vigil outside Bush’s Texas ranch, or the radical Catholic Kathy Kelly.

June 3

Put together Murdoch’s Fox News, a mid-May debate between Republican presidential candidates and the state of South Carolina and you have a hotbed of stupidity.

But to the fury of the Republican organizers there was an intrusion of rational thought, in the person of Ron Paul, a U.S. congressman from Texas, classed as a rank outsider in the nomination race.

Texas used to send true individualists to Washington, D.C. One of the brightest moments of my early years, visiting the nation’s capital, was watching Rep Wright Patman, head of the House Banking Committee, tell the red-faced Chairman of the Federal Reserve that he deserved to be locked up in the penitentiary.

Paul is the last of the breed. As a small-government, tight-money Republican, this gynecologist-obstetrician (4,000 babies claimed as a career total) regularly votes ‘No’ on pork barrel projects that would put money into his own district.

But as a Republican in the isolationist, libertarian tradition he also votes ‘No’, sometimes alone among the 535 members of the U.S. Congress, on war funding, on laws allowing presidents to order arbitrary imprisonment, “coercive interrogation” and suspension of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.

The throng in Columbia, South Carolina, cheered Giuliani, Romney and others as they roared their support for torture and rule by emergency decree. In the ‘war on terror’ anything goes. Only Paul told the crowd and the TV cameras that No, torture is wrong and the Constitution is paramount.

Paul was asked if 9/11 changed anything. U.S. foreign policy, he answered, was a “major contributing factor. Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attacked us because we’ve been over there; we’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We’ve been in the Middle East. So right now we’re building an embassy in Iraq that’s bigger than the Vatican. We’re building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting.”

A majority of Americans–65 per cent and up–hate the war in Iraq and think the U.S. troops should leave. But the leading candidates from both parties fence-straddle at best, and also parrot Giuliani on the “war on terror.” Hence the popularity of Ron Paul, as soon as he gets a national venue.

June 10

These are troubling times for evangelical Christians. The born-again president they helped elect is in the autumn of his tenure, the bold promises of Christian revival now tarnished or cast aside. Mitt Romney, the front-running Republican contender to be Bush’s successor is a Mormon, and although leading evangelical Christians have given him the nod, many foot soldiers in the service of Christ entertain doubts. “The world needs Jesus, the REAL JESUS, not Jesus the half-brother of Lucifer,” cries Kevin Stilley on his Christian site.

Then there’s the never-ending struggle with the Evil One. Still fresh in the ears of the righteous are the chortles of unbelievers over the tribulations of Pastor Ted Haggard, leader of the New Life Church, outed last year in Colorado by a former male prostitute declaring that Haggard had enjoyed sex with him, their monthly interactions enhanced by crystal meth. In February of this year Haggard had crash counseling across three weeks, overseen by four ministers, to give, as one put it, “Ted the tools to help embrace his heterosexual side”. But there have been doubts, even among evangelicals, as to whether Satan and his demons have in this instance been decisively routed after so brief an engagement.

And now, evangelicals face fresh evidence that the Dark Forces miss no opportunity to make further ravages among the righteous. Earlier this week ChristiaNet.com, “the world’s most visited Christian website”, disclosed the results of a survey it has just concluded, asking site visitors questions about their personal sexual conduct.

“The poll results indicate that 50 per cent of all Christian men and 20 per cent of all Christian women are addicted to pornography,” Jones reports bleakly. It seems that 60 per cent of the women who answered the survey admitted to having “significant struggles with lust”, 40 per cent admitted to “being involved in sexual sin in the past year”, and 20 per cent of the church-going female participants struggle with looking at pornography on an ongoing basis.

Given the sexual apathy, reported by the Chicago study, maybe abstinence is winning after all. A survey this month claims that each day more than 1million condoms are sold in the United States, this being only 0.4 per cent of the population. There’s no evidence, in the form of a population explosion, for the other possible deduction.

June 21

Summer’s hot breath draws closer and the psychoanalysts of New York and Boston prepare their patients for the difficult two or three weeks of holiday separation. Undoubtedly, beach chat among both analysts and analysands will focus on the end of the Soprano series which, across the past eight years, courtesy of Lorraine Bracco’s Jennifer Melfi–Tony Soprano’s analyst–has been the biggest boost to the shrink business since Lee J. Cobb starred in the Three Faces of Eve.

Truly comical has been the solemnity with which psychoanalysts across the United States have been deploring the “breach of professional ethics” at a shrinks’ dinner party in one of the concluding Soprano episodes in which the identity of Dr. Melfi’s patient as Mobster Tony was disclosed. The rare moments when shrinks aren’t seducing their female patients (70 per cent, in an informal New York survey some years ago) are usually consumed by such indiscretions, a tradition stretching all the way back to the notoriety of the patients trotting up the stairs of Bergasse 19, Freud’s chambers in Vienna.

It’s true that some psychoanalysts were indignant at the way Melfi, chided by her colleagues for enabling a sociopath, promptly dumped the Mafia boss as a patient, the climax of a process identified back in 1999 in the British Medical Journal by Dr. Tony David as the collision of “the superego of Melfi’s civilized values and the intellect with the murky id that is Soprano’s stock in trade.” “The strict ethical principles established by the American Psychological Association,” wrote one APA member furiously, “do not allow for the arbitrary dismissal of a client even if they are sociopathic in nature (unless there is danger to the therapist).”

It so happens that these same “strict ethical principles” of the APA have been the topic of unsparing rebuke, which probably won’t be cited much on those holiday beaches. A recent report by the Pentagon’s Inspector General confirms what has been detailed in a number of news stories since 2005 concerning the starring role played by American psychologists and psychoanalysts in devising and supervising torture techniques as administered by the U.S. military in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other secret interrogation centers run by the CIA.

The APA leadership has piously maintained that “psychologists have a critical role in keeping interrogations safe, legal, ethical and effective.” The Pentagon Inspector General’s Report makes clear this claim is ludicrous. So here we have shrinks refining Tony Soprano’s brutish violence, draping his id with the national flag.

July 24

The federal indictment of Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick on conspiracy charges associated with his pit bull breeding and training operation at Bad Newz Kennels in Smithfield, Virginia, contains searing descriptions of dreadful cruelty towards these creatures. Tears stained the venerable cheeks of Senator Bobby Byrd as the former Klan Grand Cyclops bewailed the monstros conduct of the black football star and his co-conspirators.

Indeed, the cruelties as laid out in the indictment are horrible and Vick and his coconspirators deservedly face serious penalties, if convicted on the charges. But there are the usual double standards lightly vaulted over by those busy savaging Vick. Judi Giuliani, the current wife of a candidate, hasn’t caught much heat for her infamous past as a dog torturer and killer.

August 3

Was there ever a luckier clan than the Bancrofts, whose elders okayed the $5bn sale of the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. on Tuesday?

There’s been much solemn talk about the Bancrofts’ “stewardship of this national institution” since they acquired the Dow Jones company a century ago. In fact, the Journal was an undistinguished little sheet until a journalistic genius called Barney Kilgore decided in the years after World War II that a businessman in San Francisco should be able to read the same paper as one in Chicago or New York.

Kilgore devised the technology to do this, along with the paper’s reportorial stance–serious but often humorous, in the style of the Midwest, which is where Kilgore was from.

Kilgore made the Bancrofts really rich and they continued in that state for almost half a century, though their stewardship was either indifferent or inept, beyond the pleasant chore of raking in the money. Now they can trouser Murdoch’s gold and trot off into the sunset, mumbling that they have extracted all the usual pledges from Rupert that he will respect the Journal’s editorial independence.

Surely the 76-year-old mogul must quake with inner merriment as he goes through this oft-repeated rigmarole. I heard it almost 30 years ago when he bought a raffish New York weekly, the Village Voice. I worked for the Voice at the time and, so far as I can remember, we listened to Murdoch issuing a pledge not to fire the editor as he stepped into the elevator on the fifth floor of the Voice’s offices on University Place and by the time he stepped out on the ground floor the editor had already been dismissed, as if by osmosis, and Murdoch’s man was settling into the editorial chair.

The only reason why Murdoch might respect the Journal’s independence, at least in the opinion pages, is that the views expressed there are even more rabid than his own; perhaps he savors the possibility that one day he might call up Paul Gigot, the editorial page editor, and hint that he might moderate his tone.

The Journal’s editorial stance of fanatic neoconnery was established by the late Robert Bartley (right) from the mid-’70s onward, and his pages bulged with every mad fantasy of the Cold War lobby. (I did an enjoyable ten-year stint on these same pages as the token left guest columnist, barking every three weeks at the political and corporate elites from my kennel on the op-ed page.)

Bartley led the charge against effete liberalism, and since by the late 1970s American liberalism had thoroughly lost its nerve and really was effete, he carried the day, by far the most influential editorial page editor in American journalism. More than its sometimes excellent reporting, Bartley gave the Journal its high profile in Washington as well as on Wall Street.

From the moment Murdoch made his $60-a-share offer, the actual sale has not been an edifying sight. But then, a Gadarene-like stampede for money seldom is. The final sale was consummated when Murdoch agreed to throw in a $40m sweetener for the bankers and lawyers standing at the Bancroft family elbow and, with supposed dispassion, advising them what to do. Merrill Lynch, urging the Bancrofts to sell, is promised $18.5m for this wise counsel.

Analysts of the media industry have turned out thousands of words about the synergies and kindred virtues consequent upon Murdoch’s successful bid. Maybe so. In such takeovers, things seldom go according to plan. But for now Murdoch has carried the day, acquiring for a monstrous sum an over-praised newspaper in poor straits.

Call it his revenge for the story the Journal ran about Murdoch’s Chinese wife Wendi Deng in November 2000, methodically detailing the romantic liaisons that helped her to a very powerful position in the Murdoch empire. The piece was flattering to Ms Deng’s achievements, but also one that Murdoch would be unlikely to forget or forgive. This is a saga for Dumas or Balzac.

August 7

Led by Democrats since the start of this year, the U.S. Congress now has a “confidence” rating of 14 per cent, the lowest since Gallup started asking the question in 1973 and five points lower the Republicans scored last year.

The voters put the Democrats in to end the war and it’s escalating. The Democrats voted money for the surge and the money for the next $459.6 billion military budget. Their latest achievement is to provide enough votes in support of Bush to legalize warrantless wire tapping for ” foreign suspects whose communications pass through the United States.” Enough Democrats joined Republicans to make this a 227-183 victory for Bush. The Democrats control the House. House leader Nancy Pelosi could have stopped the bill in its tracks if she’d really wanted to. But she didn’t. The game is to go along with the White House agenda while stirring up dust storms to blind the Democratic base about their failure to bring the troops home or restore constitutional government.

Just as the Democrats work tirelessly to demonstrate to the voters that it makes zero difference which party controls Congress, the political establishment forces all candidates for the presidential nominations next year to sever any compromising ties to sanity and common sense.

Right now they’re hosing down Barack Obama, for “inexperience,” after he said in the You Tube debate in South Carolina that he would be prepared to meet with Kim Jong Il, Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Fidel Castro to hash over problems face to face. The pundits promptly whacked him for demonstrating “inexperience”. Experienced leaders order the CIA to murder such men.

Then Obama drew even fiercer fire by saying he would not use nuclear weapons to fight terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance,” Obama told AP on August 2, adding after a pause, “involving civilians.” Then he quickly added, “Let me scratch that. There’s been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That’s not on the table.”

I’m beginning to respect this man. He displays sagacity well beyond the norm for candidates seeking the Oval Office. He comprehends, if only in mid-sentence, that when you drop a nuclear bomb, it will kill civilians. He also realizes that strafing Waziristan with thermonuclear devices in the hopes of nailing Osama Bin Laden is a foolish way to proceed.

So Obama is being flayed for his “inexperience”, first and foremost by Hillary Clinton, who permits no table setting which does not include a couple of nuclear weapons next to the salt and pepper. To recoup, Obama has declared his readiness as commander in chief to order U.S. forces hotly pursue Osama into Pakistan, whatever the government of Pakistan might think of this onslaught on its sovereignty.

Has the left the political capacity to influence the conduct of the Democrats? In terms of substantive achievement the answer thus far has been No. People didn’t like it when I wrote here a month ago that the anti-war movement was at a low ebb. They invoke the polls showing 70 per cent of Americans want the troops to come home. This is presumptuous, like a barking dog claiming it made the moon go down. It didn’t take an anti-war movement to make the people anti-war. People looked at the casualty figures and the newspaper headlines and drew the obvious conclusion the war is a bust. Their attention is already shifting to the crisis in subprime loans.

The left is as easily distracted, currently by the phantasm of impeachment. Why all this clamor to launch a proceeding surely destined to fail, aimed at a duo who will be out of the White House in sixteen months anyway? Pursue them for war crimes after they’ve stepped down. Mount an international campaign of the sort that has Henry Kissinger worrying at airports that there might be a lawyer with a writ standing next to the man with the limo sign. Right now the impeachment campaign is a distraction from the war and the paramount importance of ending it.

For sure, there are actions around the country: Quakers and Unitarians picketing outside shopping centers, campus vigils, resolutions by city councils and so forth. It’s all pretty quiet, in a conflict that has now–as my brother Patrick recently pointed out, gone on longer than the First World War. At the liberal blogger convention, Yearly Kos, held across the first weekend in August, the organizers nixed any serious strategy session on the war in Iraq. John Stauber of PR Watch had to force an impromptu (and very successful) session with leaders of the Iraq Veterans Against the War.

There’s no sizzle in the air, like there was back in early 2003.

August 12

African lions struggled for reassurance and meaning after the humiliating rout of four of their number by a herd of Cape buffalo (Syncerus caffer). The entire episode was filmed by a human tourist, featured on Youtube (“The buffalo’s revenge”) and has now been viewed by a world audience in the millions. The footage shows what initially appeared to be a classic “cut out and kill” maneuver straight from the book collapse into farce as an unsuccessful attempt by a crocodile to snatch the targeted calf allowed time for the buffalo herd to regroup, surround the lions, toss two of them on their horns, rescue the calf and chase their assailants away into the bush.

“This is the darkest day for Panthera leo since Frank Baum wrote the Wizard of Oz,” said the leader of one pride. “We face the total erosion of our credibility as apex predators.”

Anger mingles with apprehension. Word has already spread across the veld and now other traditional sources of nutrition such as gazelles are seeking protection amid herds of emboldened buffalo. Other ungulates such as Connochaetes taurinus (brindled gnu), commonly easy prey, are already displaying uncharacteristic defiance and fighting back.

Some lions, speaking privately, concede that defeat at the horns and hooves of the tough and hefty Cape buffalo is not unprecedented. “Look,” said one, “Syncerus caffer is always a problem for us. The disaster here stemmed from tactical folly. They wasted precious minutes in that tug of war with the crocodile and that allowed the buffalo time to return and launch a counter-attack.”

Some thoughtful lions see a paradox in the fact that the episode was filmed. “Do you think any of us would be here if it wasn’t for the National Geographic and nature films on PBS?” an elderly male asked rhetorically.

September 1

A good lawyer could have got Senator Larry Craig off, if it hadn’t been for the panic-stricken Guilty plea copped by Craig already frantic that local paper was set to out him. The cop, Dave Karsnia, entrapped him. It’s not against the constitution, at least yet, to adopt a “wide stance”. All he did was stamp his foot and waggle it about and put his hand down. It’s not as though he made any verbal suggestions to Karsnia, or exhibited his genitals. Karsnia says he was peeping. That’s just the word of a policeman against a U.S. senator. Senators probably have a better record for keeping their word–at least in political bargains, though not in campaign promises–than the folks in blue.

When people whine fearfully about the Christian right, I always tell them to relax. Sooner or later the evangelist or the pol be caught in a whorehouse or a lavatory.

Larry Craig of Idaho was a three-term senator. En route to this sanctuary of Republican virtue on June 11 Craig, co-chair of the Mitt Romney presidential campaign, used a stop-over at Minneapolis-St Paul airport to prowl through a lavatory in the Lindbergh terminal. He spotted under a stall door lower extremities belonging to a man we now know to have been undercover cop Karsnia, who–patient as any spider–had been sitting on the john for 13 minutes, waiting for prey which he could entrap.

Americans following the case have learning with fascination how easily some innocent action in a public convenience–known in the argot of gay patrons as “tearooms”–can be misconstrued. Don’t put your bag in front of the door. That’s what Craig did and Karsnia, a youthful-looking blonde decoy, says in his report, “My experience has shown that individuals engaging in lewd conduct use their bags to block the view from the front of their stall. ” Keep your feet still. “At 12:16 hours,” Karsnia relates, “Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct. Craig tapped his toes several times and moves his foot closer to my foot. I moved my foot up and down slowly. The presence of others did not seem to deter Craig as he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot which was within my stall area.”
Craig then swiped his hand under the stall divider several times. That did it. Karsnia put down his police ID for Craig to check out. Craig quickly plead guilty to disorderly conduct and “peeping”, which is defined in Minnesotan statutory lingo as “interference with privacy by surreptitiously gazing, staring or peeping in the window, or other aperture of a sleeping room in a hotel, a tanning booth–this is Minnesota, after all–or other place where a reasonable person would have an expectation of privacy and has exposed or is likely to expose their intimate parts, as defined in Sec. 609. 341, subd 5, or the clothing covering the immediate area of the intimate parts and doing so with the intent to intrude upon or interfere with the privacy of the occupant. A Gross Misdemeanor.”

At some level Craig obviously wanted to get caught, just as compulsive gamblers at some level want to lose.

September 8

Predicting imminent war on Iran has been one of the top two items in Cassandra’s repertoire for a couple of years now, rivaled only by global warming as a sure-fire way to sell newspapers and boost website hits.

But will it really come to pass?

Despite the unending stream of stories across the months announcing that an attack on Iran is on the way, I’ve had my doubts. Amid the housing slump here, with the possibility of an inflationary surge as the credit balloon threatens to explode, would the U.S. government really want to see the price of gas at the pump go over $5? What would Hugo Chavez do? Even a hiccup in flows from Venezuela would paralyze refineries here, specifically designed for Venezuelan crude. China has a big stake in Iran. It’s also Uncle Sam’s banker. The Chinese don’t have to destroy the dollar, merely squeeze its windpipe, or revalue their currency enough to double retail prices in Wal-Mart. The Republicans and the presidential candidates wouldn’t want that on the edge of an election year.

The other side of the ledger isn’t hard to fill in either. The oil companies like a crisis that sends up the price of their commodity. The Chinese are a prudent lot and don’t want to rock the world economy. Politically, both they and Russia would like to see the U.S. compound the disaster in Iraq and get into a long-term mess in Iran.

October 26

In America, awareness never sleeps and has been on particularly active duty this October, designated as Breast Cancer Awareness Month (proclamation of President George Bush); as Domestic Violence Awareness Month (proclamation of President George Bush); as Energy Awareness Month (proclamation of President George Bush and the Environmental Protection Agency); and–we speak here specifically of October 22-29–Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (proclamation of David Horowitz, a fat and hairy ex-Trot living in Los Angeles).

Cautionary interpolation: Horowitz was certainly fat last time I clapped eyes on him and he sports a beard which waxes and wanes in outreach depending on which Google image you look at. And yes, Christopher Hitchens is also a fat and hairy ex-Trot, is also a known associate of the man Horowitz, and also thunders against Islamo-Fascism. Nonetheless we speak here of Horowitz.

When I first saw Horowitz he was neither fat nor hairy nor apparently aware of Islamo-Fascism. This was in the late 1960s in London and he was working for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, studying at the feet of Isaac Deutscher and Ralph Miliband. About a decade later I saw him again, this time in Washington DC presiding over a well-publicized “Second Thoughts” conference, announcing his departure from the Left. He spoke harshly of his parents’ decision to make him watch uplifting features about the Soviet Union and forbade any Doris Day movies, a common blunder in child-brain-washing techniques among the comrades at that time.

Since then, like other Trotskyist vets, such as the above-mentioned Hitchens, Horowitz has thrown his energies into crusading on behalf of the American right, fuelled in his efforts by copious annual disbursements from the richer denizens of that well populated sector. Richard Mellon Scaife–apex demon in the “vast right-wing conspiracy” identified by Hillary Clinton amid the Lewinsky scandal–has poured millions into Horowitz’s organizations, as have other well-heeled conservative foundations. Every now and again Horowitz will raise some spectacularly nutty alarum, like the Los Angeles Times being taken over by pinkoes, and I always assume that Horowitz must be filling out his annual grant applications, and reminding Scaife that others may snooze and idle, but he, Horowitz, is unceasing in his vigilance against sedition.

In Horowitz’s bestiary, sedition comes in all the traditional forms, from commies on campus to commies in the press and he’s churned out endless bulletins charting their insidious reach. Some of his specific accusations have no doubt been useful to fearful school administrations eager to harry and expel the few radical teachers able to find employment in these bleak times.

But the problem for Horowitz is one of supply. The left in America is really in very poor shape: near zero commies, and really only a sprinkling of radical black profs, militant Lesbians and kindred antinomians to beat up on. The notion of pinkoes in the media is laughable to all except the fearful imaginations of millionaires like Scaife. Hence the spotlight on Islamo-Fascism, a gloriously vague term whose origin is the topic of a tussle between Malise Ruthven, who used the term in 1980 to describe all authoritarian Islamic governments, and Stephen Schwartz, yet another fat, bearded former Trotskyist who says he was the first to use it in its specific application in 2000, eventually receiving a tap on the shoulder for so doing from Christopher Hitchens and John Sullivan. Arise, Sir Stephen!

Islamo-Fascism Awareness week has been featuring Horowitz and big-name ranters of the right like Anne Coulter and Fox’s Sean Hannity, plus former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, and noted Islamophobe Daniel Pipes. They descended on various college campuses to be received by Christian-Fascists and the curious while they hurled imprecations at the left for being soft on sons of the Prophet stoning women to death for adultery.

The reaction of the left has been mixed. In some ways it always takes Horowitz’s antics far too seriously, though the latter’s effect on timid college administrations cannot be entirely gainsaid. On the other hand, Awareness week is having a galvanizing effect. Coalitions have formed to combat Horowitz’s version of Awareness with superior Progressive Awareness about what is good or not so good about Islam. Since Santorum and others have ripe records of intolerance for women, the air is usefully thick with shouts of “hypocrite.” Horowitz is probably the best organizer the left has these days.

November 8

Schizophrenia is a mandatory condition for all Democratic presidential candidates, never more so than at this stage in America’s election cycle. If a Democrat mentions love in the first part of any sentence, there had better be an endorsement of hate and of war before the full stop.

So, of course, Hillary bobs and weaves. Her problem is that she’s not too quick on her feet, unlike her husband Bill, a Baryshnikov of equivocation. In last week’s TV debate, out there under the spotlights, with Barack Obama and John Edwards gunning for her, Mrs. Clinton blew it on the immigration question, just when every laptop pundit in the blogosphere was getting bored with the apparent certainty that H Clinton would be the party’s nominee.

So they’ve been piling on ever since. Will she implode, just like that front-runner of November 2004, Howard Dean?

Hillary has a ton of money and the solid support of the party’s bosses, which is not surprising since the Clintons picked these bosses in the first place. A great many women in America want her to be president. Recovery is a process the Clintons have been refining ever since Hillary got herself into trouble with the voters of Arkansas back in 1978 for insisting that the first lady of that state be called Hillary Rodham, a stand on feminist principle she abandoned in time for the 1980 governor’s race.

Hillary will almost certainly tack to safety out of this mini-typhoon. But the bigger problem is not going away. There’s a solid slice of the Old-Glory-loving superpatriots who will never, under any conditions, vote for Hillary Clinton a year from now. Every equivocation on immigrants, on the war, will be replayed mercilessly next autumn.

Hillary’s best chance is to have the Republican vote split by the Evangelical Christians – unable to stomach a pro-abortion wife-hopper like Rudy Giuliani – running a candidate of their own. Some born-again type from the South.

December 13

If there was ever a parable about the futility of congressional “oversight,” it’s surely the uproar over the CIA’s secret destruction of thevideotapes of its torture sessions on the Al Qaeda men, Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Here we have the spectacle of members of the CIA oversight committees like Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia saying virtuously the CIA never told him about deep-sixing the videos. If true, the CIA was stupid. All the Agency needed to have done was set up a secret viewing room on Capitol Hill and had “last peek before we burn them” sessions. Sworn to silence, a few senators and Reps would have trooped along, no doubt with Larry Craig in the front row, hogging three seats with his wide stance.

The CIA continues to maintain it doesn’t go in for torture. As Jeffrey St Clair and I describe in detail in Whiteout, our book on the CIA (available at www.counterpunch.org), the documented record of its savageries in this area goes back decades, starting with the recruitment of Nazi torture technicians in Operation Paperclip. The Fifties saw its increasing obsession with brainwashing and sensory deprivation. The CIA supplied the interrogators for the Phoenix program in Vietnam.

Down the years, the CIA has methodically destroyed records on matters pertaining to torture, assassination and mind-control. Every decade there are protestations that malpractices have definitively ceased, usually just before the tenure ends of the CIA director making the claim. Every decade they continue.

December 20

The great dread of American political establishments down the decades has been that a wild man will suddenly sneak past all obstructions cunningly devised to repel uncomfortable surprises and upset the apple cart. Democrats even today shiver at the memory of William Jennings Bryan, another implacable foe of Charles Darwin, who ran on a silver platform in the late nineteenth century. George Wallace, a redneck governor out of Alabama, ran as an independent presidential candidate in 1968 and Richard Nixon was terrified that he would steal enough votes to throw the race to the Democrat, Hubert Humphrey. A would-be assassin’s bullet put paid to that threat.
The clamor about Huckabee’s Christian beliefs is overdone, not least among the left whose bigotry on matters of religion is particularly unappetizing. A robust majority of all Americans, so polls unfailingly show, maintain they have had personal encounters with Jesus Christ. Ronald Reagan believed and publicly stated more than once that the Apocalypse was scheduled to occur in his lifetime at Megiddo, as excitingly trailered in the Good Book. The soigné Governor Mitt Romney, now displaced by Huckabee as the front-runner, is a Mormon and this, unless he is a heretic from the Latter Day Saints on this specific issue, believes that Christ was Lucifer’s older brother, as Huckabee has not been slow in pointing out.

But Huckabee should not be dismissed as simply the creature of the Christian fundamentalists who play a very significant role in the Republican primaries and who are currently hoisting him in the polls. Of course they like Huckabee for all the obvious reasons, and because the alternatives are the Mormon Romney or Giuliani, who’s hopped from wife to wife, shared an apartment with a male gay couple and favors abortion.

But on many substantive matters, demonstrated during his ten years as the governor of Arkansas, Huckabee was often a progressive, with enlightened views and a record of substantive executive action on immigration, public health, education of poor kids and the possibility of redemption for convicted criminals. In his ten years as governor, Huckabee commuted the sentences of, or outright pardoned, over 1,200 felons including a dozen murderers. This was a courageous and unparalleled display of enlightenment in a country whose interest in rehabilitation is near zero. As Huckabee said in answer to Mitt “throw away the key” Romney, should a woman convicted of check-kiting when she was 17, have this criminal offense prevent her from getting a job thirty years later?

Democrats started by chortling over Huckabee’s meteoric rise in the national polls. The Democratic National Committee supposedly ordered a moratorium to onslaughts on the Arkansas governor in the hopes that as the nominee he will be roadkill for them in the race next fall. This patronizing posture is already fraying. Huckabee would not be a pushover. He’s quick on his feet, has an easy sense of humor and has a powerful appeal to Americans unconvinced by any of the major contenders.

Thus far, beyond hee-haws at his Christian fundamentalism, the most the liberals can come up with is that he intervened to save his son from very nasty charges of dog-abuse at a Boy Scout camp and that among those whose sentences he commuted was a rapist, Wayne Dumond, who killed at least one woman after his release. Murray Waas has devoted thousands of plodding words to the case.

It’s chilling to watch liberals and pwogs thundering their outrage at the mere idea of pardons or commutations, as though one of the besetting horrors of America today isn’t the penological mindset that puts people behind bars for decades, or the living death of what the criminal justice industry laconically terms LWOP, Life Without the Possibility of Parole. Let’s go back to 1988, when Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis, who had supervised an elightened parole and day-release program as governor of Massachusetts, was trashed for letting Willie Horton out of prison on a weekend pass. Who first raised the Horton issue. No, not George Bush Sr. Not Lee Atwater. It was Al Gore, in the ’88 Democratic primaries.

Of course, if you decide not to let people rot in prison for forty years, and let some of them out, there’s a chance there’ll be a Dumond or a Horton among those released. That’s a risk. To say that it’s an unacceptable risk is the same as saying there’s a risk in administering the death penalty, because an innocent person might get gassed or killed with poison, but that nonetheless the price is worth it. Some guy with a DUI on his record gets his license back, gets loaded again and kills another carload of innocents. So, we should bring in a lifetime ban of all DUIs from driving ever again? More people get killed by drivers with DUIs on their record than by convicted killers let out of prison, or for that matter by sex offenders. These days, with liberal assent, sex offenders serve their full terms and still can’t get out of prison. Run a society totally on principles of revenge, not forgiveness or redemption and you end up in the realm of Milton’s Moloch, “besmeared with blood of human sacrifice and parents’ tears.”

Then there are the corruption charges. Huckabee accepted gift vouchers for meals at Taco Bell and had a registry at Target and Dillard’s where he and his wife got big-ticket items like a Jack LaLanne juicer. Hold the front page! From reading the furious brayings of Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, you’d think Huckabee was the Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Republic, crowned on a golden throne, wearing a Roman toga embroidered with a hundred thousand pearls, then driving off in a coach pulled by six white horses flown from Paris.

Try as they may, dustrakers like Taibbi have a hard time showing Huckabee was anything more than a piker in the perks department.

Here’s some of the record of shame. Total for items requested on the Target wedding registry, $2,282, including a 12-piece cookware set for $249, a DeLonghi retro 4-slice toaster for $39.99, napkins, kitchen towels, two king-sized pillows and a clock. Total on the Dillard’s registry, $4,635, not omitting the Jack Lalanne juicer for $100.

True, the Huckabees got married in 1974, but they had that covenant marriage in 2005, which is certainly as convincing as Hillary Clinton saying she just got lucky when, as Arkansas’ first lady she made $99,000 on cattle futures off an initial stake of $1,000, the whole miraculous bonanza organized by a guy in the retinue of Don Tyson, the largest food processor in the state of Arkansas. More convincing, actually.

As so often with American politicians accused of graft and corruption, one reels back in embarrassment at the tiny sums involved. In 2003, Huckabee was fined $250 by the State Ethics Commission of bringing shame on Arkansas by accepting a $500 canoe from Coca-Cola in 2001.

The Commission also gave him a rap on the knuckles for not reporting acceptance of a $200 stadium blanket the same year. He probably wanted it to put over his knees in the canoe.

Huckabee appealed the sanctions to Pulaski County Circuit Court. Judge Fox said he should have owned up to the blanket, but threw out the $ 250 fine, finding that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to show that the canoe, painted with the words “Coke, Arkansas and You,” illegally rewarded Huckabee for doing his job as governor. Huckabee battled other such charges, including more substantial gifts of clothes and furniture. It was all familiar stuff, to connoisseurs of small-time corruption charges. Were the suits for the shrunken Huckabee to deploy to Arkansas’ advantage at conferences of governors or trade trips abroad? Was the furniture for the rehabbed governor’s mansion while Mr. and Mrs. Huckabee roosted in the doublewide?

Arkansas underpays its governors as a matter of policy, forcing them into a flexible ethical posture, as opposed to chill high mindedness. Incorruptibles are often more of a menace to society. The American way, which isn’t so bad, is to have the laws on the books, for proper use if things start getting seriously out of control. Corruption, held within bounds, is a useful lubricant.

Is it really worse for Muscovites to slip the traffic cop 500 roubles ($20), thus paying a de facto fine, as opposed to getting a ticket, and mailing in your $250 speeding fine to the County Superior Court?

Bill Clinton got $20,000 a year for governing Arkansas. Huckabee got $80,000. These guys had to go to McDonalds or Taco Bell. It’s all they could afford. Of course they pocketed $10,000 bribes in cash for issuing end use certificates and the like. If the truth be told, Gov. Clinton in his Arkansas days in the governor’s mansion, was a piker in corruption, just like Huckabee. The laughable thing about Whitewater was the pathetically small sums the Clintons stood to make if all went well, which they did not. When the tribunal investigating Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey finally concluded its labors, long after his death, I totted up the proven bribes and it came to something like $50 million.

So Huckabee will probably survive these charges, as he should the whines of New York Times columnists that he is unversed in foreign affairs. Both Ronald Reagan and George Bush demonstrated conclusively that a passing glance at a stamp album is the only education required for dealing with the rest of the world.

The number of people hungry and homeless in US cities rose dramatically again in 2007, according to the annual report on hunger and homelessness from the US Conference of Mayors. The 23-city Hunger and Homelessness Survey was released in late December.

Requests for emergency food increased in four of every five cities. Among 15 cities with quantifying data, the median increase in requests for food was 10 percent and in some cities it was much higher. Detroit and some other cities reported seeing more working poor among those seeking food.

In Detroit, emergency food requests shot up 35 percent over the 12-month period ending in October. Officials there noted that “due to a lack of resources, emergency food assistance facilities have had to reduce the number of days and/or hours of operation.”

Thirteen of 19 survey cities reported they could not meet the demand for emergency food. Los Angeles was one of the major cities reporting difficulties in serving the growing need.

An official in LA said: “Emergency food assistance facilities have to turn away people. According to the LA Regional Foodbank, over 30 percent of their food pantries have had to turn clients away and pantries that don’t turn clients away are providing less food.

“In 2002, a food pantry would provide an average of eight to ten different USDA commodities per distribution. This holiday season, food pantries are providing three USDA commodities. Food pantries are tasked to serve more clients with the same amount of resources they had six years ago. Twenty-one percent of overall demand for emergency food assistance goes unmet.”

Across all cities, an average of 15 percent of families with children looking for emergency food must be turned away. Nine in 10 of the cities sampled for details on the urban hunger crisis say they expect increases in food requests next year.

City officials said specific factors exacerbating hunger over the past year were the foreclosure crisis, the high prices of food and gasoline, and the lack of affordable housing. Decreased social benefits such as public assistance and the eroding value of food stamps were also listed as particularly acute problems. Lack of donated food and commodities and insufficient funding were listed as the most important reason for turning away the hungry.

Economic issues such as unemployment and poverty along with high housing and medical costs were most cited by responding cities as the major causes of chronic hunger. Substance abuse and mental illness were the least cited.

Homelessness

In 20 of the cities included in the survey, 193,183 people had stays in emergency shelters and/or transitional housing in the past year. The average duration was six months for families and five months for individuals, down from eight months last year.

The mayors’ survey statistics capture unduplicated stays in city temporary housing facilities, meaning if shelter was provided, a stay lasting weeks or months would be counted as just one unduplicated stay.

The survey found that nearly one in four unduplicated shelter stays were by members of family groups. The ratio of family members to singles was found to be roughly equal in homeless counts compiled elsewhere that document sheltered homeless on any given individual night.

In general, cities reported actual increases in households with children in their transitional or emergency housing over the past year. Nine in 10 cities said that more permanent housing was needed to mediate the problem of homelessness.

Thousands of beds to house the homeless were added in the surveyed cities, yet half the cities reported they turn people away some or all of the time. In Phoenix, 7,000 to 10,000 are homeless on any given night and 3,000 cannot be sheltered due to lack of beds.

Individual city profiles come from the broad range of US cities that participate in the report. They have widely different average per capita incomes and are located in various parts of the country. For example, Santa Monica, California, a city of 83,000 with a per capita income of $58,000, reports 728 singles and 142 households with children were sheltered homeless in 2007. In contrast, Philadelphia, with a population of 1.4 million and a poverty rate of 23 percent, reports 8,103 individuals and 5,300 households with children in this category.

These profiles show only those individuals that find shelter. Miami, a city of 360,000, reported only 735 families and 365 individuals were in sheltered housing for some duration during the past year. Des Moines, a city half the size of Miami but in a much colder climate, reported 3,632 families and 2,436 individuals were sheltered homeless in 2007.

Limitations in reporting

Twenty-three cities whose mayors are members of the US Conference of Mayors Task force on Hunger and Homelessness contributed in some form to the report for the year ending October 30.

The City Profiles section of the survey includes various reports of band-aid programs undertaken by city administrations that admittedly fall far short of need. More importantly, taken together, these local reports detailing city-by-city conditions are more valuable in providing some insight into the problems of hunger and homelessness that is largely absent from political discourse in the US. The statistics on hunger and homelessness are far more current when compared to official government reports that rely on much older data.

A section in the report entitled “Limitations of this Study” points to efforts under way this year or planned for the future to gather more precise data. This is apparently in response to right-wing critics who have impugned the value of the report in previous years, claiming it was not a representative sample and overstated the extent of poverty. This response by the study’s authors ignores the real reason for these critics’ discomfort—the desire to limit any light being shed on the twin scourges of hunger and homelessness characteristic of the social landscape of US cities.

The study was first conceived by Democratic mayors as urban populations were hit by federal budget cuts under the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. The year-to-year comparison chart at the end of the report has been a veritable misery index, right through the Clinton and the Bush years, showing double-digit increases almost every year in requests for emergency food and shelter. Yet for reasons not stated, the appendix with the 16-year historical chart comparing year-to-year survey results is omitted this year.

Weird, isn’t it, how swiftly the narrative is laid down for us. Benazir Bhutto, the courageous leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, is assassinated in Rawalpindi – attached to the very capital of Islamabad wherein ex-General Pervez Musharraf lives – and we are told by George Bush that her murderers were “extremists” and “terrorists”. Well, you can’t dispute that.

But the implication of the Bush comment was that Islamists were behind the assassination. It was the Taliban madmen again, the al-Qa’ida spider who struck at this lone and brave woman who had dared to call for democracy in her country.

Of course, given the childish coverage of this appalling tragedy – and however corrupt Ms Bhutto may have been, let us be under no illusions that this brave lady is indeed a true martyr – it’s not surprising that the “good-versus-evil” donkey can be trotted out to explain the carnage in Rawalpindi.

Who would have imagined, watching the BBC or CNN on Thursday, that her two brothers, Murtaza and Shahnawaz, hijacked a Pakistani airliner in 1981 and flew it to Kabul where Murtaza demanded the release of political prisoners in Pakistan. Here, a military officer on the plane was murdered. There were Americans aboard the flight – which is probably why the prisoners were indeed released.

Only a few days ago – in one of the most remarkable (but typically unrecognised) scoops of the year – Tariq Ali published a brilliant dissection of Pakistan (and Bhutto) corruption in the London Review of Books, focusing on Benazir and headlined: “Daughter of the West”. In fact, the article was on my desk to photocopy as its subject was being murdered in Rawalpindi.

Towards the end of this report, Tariq Ali dwelt at length on the subsequent murder of Murtaza Bhutto by police close to his home at a time when Benazir was prime minister – and at a time when Benazir was enraged at Murtaza for demanding a return to PPP values and for condemning Benazir’s appointment of her own husband as minister for industry, a highly lucrative post.

In a passage which may yet be applied to the aftermath of Benazir’s murder, the report continues: “The fatal bullet had been fired at close range. The trap had been carefully laid, but, as is the way in Pakistan, the crudeness of the operation – false entries in police log-books, lost evidence, witnesses arrested and intimidated – a policeman killed who they feared might talk – made it obvious that the decision to execute the prime minister’s brother had been taken at a very high level.”

When Murtaza’s 14-year-old daughter, Fatima, rang her aunt Benazir to ask why witnesses were being arrested – rather than her father’s killers – she says Benazir told her: “Look, you’re very young. You don’t understand things.” Or so Tariq Ali’s exposé would have us believe. Over all this, however, looms the shocking power of Pakistan’s ISI, the Inter Services Intelligence.

This vast institution – corrupt, venal and brutal – works for Musharraf.

But it also worked – and still works – for the Taliban. It also works for the Americans. In fact, it works for everybody. But it is the key which Musharraf can use to open talks with America’s enemies when he feels threatened or wants to put pressure on Afghanistan or wants to appease the ” extremists” and “terrorists” who so oppress George Bush. And let us remember, by the way, that Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter beheaded by his Islamist captors in Karachi, actually made his fatal appointment with his future murderers from an ISI commander’s office. Ahmed Rashid’s book Taliban provides riveting proof of the ISI’s web of corruption and violence. Read it, and all of the above makes more sense.

But back to the official narrative. George Bush announced on Thursday he was “looking forward” to talking to his old friend Musharraf. Of course, they would talk about Benazir. They certainly would not talk about the fact that Musharraf continues to protect his old acquaintance – a certain Mr Khan – who supplied all Pakistan’s nuclear secrets to Libya and Iran. No, let’s not bring that bit of the “axis of evil” into this.

So, of course, we were asked to concentrate once more on all those ” extremists” and “terrorists”, not on the logic of questioning which many Pakistanis were feeling their way through in the aftermath of Benazir’s assassination.

It doesn’t, after all, take much to comprehend that the hated elections looming over Musharraf would probably be postponed indefinitely if his principal political opponent happened to be liquidated before polling day.

So let’s run through this logic in the way that Inspector Ian Blair might have done in his policeman’s notebook before he became the top cop in London.

Question: Who forced Benazir Bhutto to stay in London and tried to prevent her return to Pakistan? Answer: General Musharraf.

Question: Who ordered the arrest of thousands of Benazir’s supporters this month? Answer: General Musharraf.

Question: Who placed Benazir under temporary house arrest this month? Answer: General Musharraf.

Question: Who declared martial law this month? Answer General Musharraf.

Question: who killed Benazir Bhutto?

Er. Yes. Well quite.

You see the problem? Yesterday, our television warriors informed us the PPP members shouting that Musharraf was a “murderer” were complaining he had not provided sufficient security for Benazir. Wrong. They were shouting this because they believe he killed her.

A “Perfect storm” refers to the simultaneous occurrence of events which, taken individually, would be far less powerful than the result of their chance combination. Such occurrences are rare by their very nature. — Wikipedia

In recent weeks we have been bombarded with reports of perturbations in the mortgage/liquidity crisis that is creating havoc in the financial world.

The travails of the “financial industry”, as it is called these days, are affecting oil prices at least as much as the normal forces of supply and demand.

Commentary on what is about to befall us is becoming scarier with each passing day. Learned professors are writing in the New York Times that our financial system is in danger of coming unglued. The general thesis is that America’s financial institutions are only capitalized at $1.1 trillion yet they are supporting $11 trillion worth of mortgages. Home prices are going to have to fall by 30-50 percent before most people can afford to buy homes again. When this drop in housing value is over, some 20 million homes will be mortgaged for far more than they are worth and a fair portion is likely to be abandoned. Some think the banking system is in for some very hard times. Others have dubbed the burgeoning financial crisis “peak money.”

But there is more: global warming seems to be causing unprecedented droughts and glacial melting which in turn are leading to lower food production and empty reservoirs and a substantial drop in hydro-electric production around the world.

Welcome to “peak climate,” “peak food,” “peak water,” “peak electricity,” or as some people are putting it, “peak everything.”

Some parts of the world are pumping so much fossil fuel emissions into the air that they can barely breathe. Perhaps they are reaching “peak air?” Then there are worries about the world’s carrying capacity –- “peak people?”

There is no question that a lot of bad things are about to happen –- more or less simultaneously. If some “peaks” we can see looming ahead occur at the same time, they will reinforce each other leading to a far more serious situation than if they occurred decades apart where they could be dealt with separately. Simultaneous shortages of fuel and water in the same area would have serious consequences as large resources would have to be devoted to providing life-sustaining water supplies, putting additional pressure on oil supplies and prices. If the drought in the Southeastern U.S. continues much longer, Atlanta may be the first large city in the U.S. to experience this phenomenon.

Other peak situations cut both ways and may have unforeseen and unintended consequences. Food grain-based biofuels (peak oil vs. peak food) should in theory help to mitigate the peak oil situation but is contributing significantly to peak food and higher food prices. The amount of corn-based ethanol being produced today is making a minimal contribution to keeping down oil prices while resulting in much higher food prices. Increases in fuel and food prices are starting to result in significant inflation which in turn is complicating efforts to deal with peak money.

The timing of the various peaks will have a lot do with how they interact with each other. Serious consequences from global warming (peak climate) is usually thought of as being many years ahead, but if the Georgia drought turns out to be a consequence of global warming then massive economic damage from global warming may be closer than many imagine.

Keeping in mind that as yet unimagined interactions and consequences of the various peaks may arise, at the minute it seems that a major financial crisis and peak oil will set in during the next few years. The interaction of these phenomena will be complicated. At times they will mitigate each other and at times will reinforce the troubles. Currently the consensus of the global market is that as prospects for a recession improve, oil prices deserve to go down based on an eventual drop in demand. In recent weeks, we have seen nearly every governmental attempt to deal with the liquidity crisis in the U.S. and Europe resulting in surges in oil prices in hopes they will be successful.

The interaction of declining oil supplies and a world monetary situation out of control would seem to have the most potential for serious trouble in the immediate future. Newspapers, magazines and the cybersphere are filling with stories by credentialed and knowledgeable people saying that a financial meltdown has already started and that the situation will get much worse in the next year.

Current evidence suggests that at least in the U.S., Europe and China the demand for oil will continue to remain high until completely overwhelmed by economic difficulties. With the world’s population increasing by 76 million each year, the demand for food is unlikely to subside and prices are likely to increase – food-based biofuels production or not.

Thirty years ago when inflation grew and the economies sagged, we called it “stagflation.” This time the term may be too mild to encompass what seems about to happen. Within the next year our liquidity problems, unsatisfied demand for oil, growing food and water shortages, and other consequences of overindulgence appear likely to merge into an unprecedented economic storm. In the midst of this storm, which could continue for years, world oil production is likely to decline forever and the resources to mitigate the storm are likely to become very scarce.

On November 3rd, I felt a stadium shake from 6,000 students jumping to their feet and chanting “Green Jobs, Not Jails! Parks, Not Prisons! We Won’t Stop Till Somebody Listens!” It was kind of a national coming-out party for the youth climate movement. More than a student environmental conference, Powershift 2007 was a moment revealing youth power and its potential to drive some deeply transformative shifts in this country.

Powershift was a project of Energy Action, a youth founded and led coalition of over 40 organizations ranging the spectrum from Greenpeace to the Indigenous Environmental Network. The goal was to bring together student leaders from across the nation to College Park, Maryland, for what would become the largest youth summit on Global Warming to date. Energy Action outlined three goals for the conference; to ensure that Climate Change be a central issue in the 2008 Presidential campaign, to empower a “truly diverse network of young leaders,” and to have geographic diversity in the attendance.

Groups from the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) to the Arab-American Action Network (AAAN) mobilized their membership, while student organizers on campuses coordinated bus travel for youth leaders from all over the country. The most striking aspect of Powershift was that the bulk of the outreach was done not through traditional activist organizations, but through academic networks of professors and school administrations. Participants were more likely to have come to the conference through their environmental science class or recycling program than with an organized group campaigning for change.

Powershift, whether intentionally or not, was perfectly positioned to engage a base of budding activists-to-be, giving them a sense that they were part of a larger movement for the first time. The movement-building groups in attendance seized the opportunity.

Van Jones, founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, spoke about grassroots organizing, climate justice, and movement building in a language accessible and engaging to the thousands of young people in attendance. He went beyond urging the predominantly white crowd to start making connections between economic and racial justice and the environment. Instead, he asserted that our movements had already come together; that this new movement includes everyone. He went on to warn that the right wing was plotting to defeat us by dividing us. “This is a poor people’s movement. And we aren’t going to be tricked into leaving anyone behind… If we win cuts on carbon emissions, without using them as a platform to transform our economy, we will have failed.” The crowd roared.

Whether or not our movements are actually united, Van was able to animate and excite new folks, most of whom had likely never heard of “climate justice” before. Deep into the night, students talked about how we can’t let the politicians trick us into thinking that climate change is solvable without addressing larger issues of social inequity.

Democratic Representative Ed Markey spoke too, appealing to students to support his energy bill. When outlining his plan for 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, students in the stadium spontaneously broke out into thunderous chanting “We Want More! We Want More!” forcing Markey to stop in the middle of his speech. “We want more” was a fitting slogan for the tone of Powershift. Person after person that I spoke to kept saying the same thing: the older generation has screwed us. It’s time for us to take our future back.

Panels and discussions at the conference included delegations from Indigenous communities ravaged by US agribusiness, organizers talking about civil disobedience and direct action, racial justice organizers discussing the concept of Green Jobs, and young people debating the role of student organizing in social movements. The workshop tracks included “Anti-Oppression and Diversity,” “Campus Organizing,” “Corporate Campaigning,” “Environmental Justice/Energy,” “Media and Messaging,” “Skills Trainings,” among others.

Much of Powershift was geared toward opening doorways into the movement. One such project was called “I Shot Powershift.” Energy Action gave away 100 video cameras to youth leaders, on the condition that they film 5 short clips during the conference, upload them to youtube, and tag them “Powershift07.” They would then commit to uploading at least 12 more videos throughout the year based on their local work. The end result will be thousands of videos of young people taking action on climate change, flooding the internet. What better way to help young people, who often feel isolated on their own campuses, feel like they are part of a larger movement?

After two days of panels and workshops, Powershifters wearing green hard-hats descended upon Capitol Hill for a day of lobbying and rallying. Simultaneously, more than 300 students joined Rainforest Action Network (RAN), Coal River Mountain Watch, and SEAC in a mass die-in that shut down a major Citibank branch for the day. Citi is one of the biggest funders of coal-fired power plants. While Appalachian women whose communities are being ravaged by mountain-top removal rallied the crowd, activists in haz-mat suits dumped coal all over the front of the bank. With an infectious energy, positive and creative chanting and messaging, tons of art, and no arrests, it was an exciting and radicalizing first action for many of the 300+ students “dying.”

As global warming increasingly becomes “the issue of our generation” it will be up to us to frame the national debate and push for deeper changes. In large coalitions, differences on how to move forward always exist, and Energy Action is certainly no exception. We still have a lot of work to do to build the kind of movement Van Jones spoke of. Powershift 2007, not without its own contradictions, marked an important turn toward a climate justice framework, an exciting development within the larger environmental movement here in the US.

The ten worst appointees for reproductive freedom.

“On September 11, we saw clearly that evil exists in this world, and that it does not value life … Now we are engaged in a fight against evil and tyranny to preserve and protect life.” – George W. Bush in 2002, linking abortion rights with terrorism, as he declared the 29th anniversary of Roe v. Wade to be “National Sanctity of Human Life Day.”

Bush has used his Oval Office years to limit reproductive freedom and stack critical posts with right-wingers bent on rolling back the clock.

And now it appears yet another reactionary Bush appointee is on track to get a lifetime position as a federal judge…

Bush nominated Wyoming lawyer and former state representative Richard Honaker to the US District Court back in March, but the reproductive rights group NARAL believes he may soon get a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Honacker authored a 1991 bill which would have outlawed most abortions, and has said that abortion is “wrong, and no one should have the right to do what is wrong.”

If the nomination goes through, Honacker will stay on the bench long after Bush is out of office, and he’ll join a growing list of appointees eager to regulate your sexuality. A Top Ten list, so far…

1. Patricia Funderburk Ware

In 2001, Bush named abstinence-only proponent Patricia Funderburk Ware to be Executive Director of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA). Ware’s qualifications for the job of promoting “effective prevention of HIV disease” included criticizing condom use and lobbying against HIV/AIDS being in the Americans With Disabilities Act. Two years later, Ware recommended that a controversial character named Jerry Thacker join the PACHA panel. Thacker has called AIDS a “gay plague” and homosexuality a “deathstyle.” Amid public protest, Thacker soon withdrew his nomination and Ware left her PACHA post.

2. Tom Coburn

Bush nominated then-Rep. Tom Coburn (R-OK) to be PACHA co-chair in 2003. Coburn supports mandatory reporting to public authorities of the names of those testing positive for HIV/AIDS. He favors “the death penalty for abortionists and other people who take life.”

According to Coburn, the gay community “has infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country, and they wield extreme power… That agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today. Why do you think we see the rationalization for abortion and multiple sexual partners? That’s a gay agenda.” Who else would you want advising the Bush administration on AIDS?

3. David Hager

Hager was one of three religious conservatives that Bush put on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in 2002 and only public outcry prevented him from becoming its chairperson. Critics argued that in his gynecology practice, Hager had refused to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women and had recommended Scripture readings to alleviate headaches and premenstrual syndrome. A memo which Hager wrote helped persuade the FDA to overrule its own advisory panel in 2004, thus preventing the emergency contraceptive “Plan B” from being made more easily available. Critics assailed the FDA’s decision as ignoring scientific evidence, but in Hager’s assessment: “Once again, what Satan meant for evil, God turned into good.” A downright criminal side of Hager emerged when his former wife went public with the fact that he had been emotionally, physically and sexually abusive during their 32-year marriage, forcibly sodomizing her on a regular basis. As Hager’s ex-wife told The Nation magazine in May 2005, “it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the [anal] sex that was so horrible.”

4. & 5. Lester Crawford and Norris Alderson

As Acting Commissioner of the FDA, Lester Crawford was notorious for blocking over-the-counter access to emergency contraception (EC).

Democratic senators initially halted Crawford’s confirmation to head the FDA, but gave approval in June 2005 after he promised to take action on EC by September 1, 2005. Once sworn in, however, Crawford stalled yet again, despite the FDA Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee’s having voted 23 to 4 in favor of making EC available over-the-counter. Dr. Susan Wood, the well-respected head of the FDA Women’s Health Office, soon resigned in protest – and that’s when things got really bizarre. Weeks after Wood stepped down, the FDA Women’s Health Office sent out a mass email announcing that she would be replaced by Dr. Norris Alderson, who was duly listed on the FDA site as: “Acting Director, Office of Women’s Health, Associate Commissioner for Science.” One small problem. Alderson is a veterinarian.

The administration appointed an animal doctor to be in charge of women’s health. Speaks volumes, doesn’t it? After predictable outcry, the FDA tried to pretend that Alderson had never been appointed in the first place. Recipients of the initial mass emailing, of course, knew otherwise. To make things even weirder, Crawford himself suddenly resigned as head of the FDA in September 2005 (just months after having been confirmed), amid allegations of not having properly disclosed his financial holdings to the Senate.

In August 2006, the FDA finally approved making the EC “Plan B” available over-the counter to consumers 18 years and older.

6. John G. Roberts

Progressives balked in September 2005 when Bush put forward far-right extremist John G. Roberts to head the US Supreme Court. In Robert’s illustrious career, he had fought against minority voting rights, argued against women’s educational rights, and tried to limit the rights of women prisoners. A legal brief Roberts contributed to said that Roe vs. Wade was “wrongly decided and should be overruled.”

Roberts became Chief Justice within weeks of his nomination, and as expected, has dragged the Supreme Court to the right. In the past two years, for example, the Roberts’ court upheld the constitutionality of a federal anti-abortion law (the so-called Partial Birth Abortion Act) and decreased public school students’ rights to free speech.

7. Samuel Alito

In January 2006, the stridently anti-choice Samuel Alito was sworn in to the US Supreme Court. Alito had previously argued that the strip-search of a mother and ten-year old girl without a warrant was constitutional and that women should be required to tell their husbands before getting an abortion. Alito stated in a 1985 application to be Deputy Assistant Attorney General: “I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to abortion.” For good measure, he added, “I am and always have been a conservative.”

Alito replaced the moderate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the nation’s high court. The obvious shift to the right caused by the addition of Roberts and Alito led Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer to observe: “It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much.”

8. Paul Bonicelli

In October 2005, Paul Bonicelli was appointed as Deputy Assistant Administrator for the US international development agency’s Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance (DCHA). Bonicelli’s main prior claim to fame was being Dean of Academic Affairs at the fundamentalist Patrick Henry College, where the Student Honor Code mandates: “I will reserve sexual activity for the sanctity of marriage.” Patrick Henry College also has a 10-part Statement of Faith which says that hell is a place where “all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity.” Bonicelli’s current office at DCHA is responsible for: “strengthening the rule of law and respect for human rights; promoting more genuine and competitive elections and political processes; increasing development of a politically active civil society; and implementing a more transparent and accountable governance.” In other words, a guy who thinks that non-believers “shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity” has been put in charge of promoting human rights across the world.

9. Eric Keroak

In 2006, Bush tapped Eric Keroack to be Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs at the Health and Human Services Department. Keroack opposes contraception, has described premarital sex as “modern germ warfare,” and espouses the bizarre, unscientific belief that casual sex depletes “bonding” hormones. He was previously medical director of a Christian pregnancy counseling service which described contraception as “demeaning to women.” And that’s who the Bush administration chose to oversee the distribution of $283 million in family planning funds for the nation.

Keroack resigned in March 2007, after state Medicaid officials began taking action against his private medical practice.

10. Susan Orr

Keroack was replaced by Susan Orr, who had been “Senior Director for Marriage and Families” at the anti-gay, anti-reproductive rights Family Research Council. In her prior career, Orr had opposed the emergency contraception RU-486 and gushed that Bush was “pro-life… in his heart” for withholding funds from international family planning groups which even discussed abortion. Orr has claimed that contraception is “not a medical necessity.” Yet she now is in charge of facilitating access to both contraception and sex education for low-income families across the nation.

While presidential candidate George W. Bush insisted that he would put “competent judges on the bench, people who will strictly interpret the Constitution and will not use the bench to write social policy,” his judicial and other appointments have proven otherwise. And these appointees will not leave office when Bush does.

U.S. farm subsidies under the 2002 farm bill have been repeatedly challenged by trading partners, and new bill proposals from Congress would likely worsen the situation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s top economist said.

“We are going to face continuing challenges for our domestic support programs” unless lawmakers make significant changes to their legislation to overhaul the farm bill, USDA Chief Economist Keith Collins told Dow Jones Newswires in an interview Thursday.

The 2002 farm bill had been set to expire in September, but Congress is late in completing its work on cobbling together a new five-year farm policy bill. The House passed its version in July, but the Senate did not approve its bill until December. Both houses must come together and resolve their differences before presenting a unified piece of legislation to the White House.

Bush administration officials have made veto threats to both the House and Senate, saying the bills lack necessary subsidy reform.

Instead of reining in subsidies in a time when some prices farmers receive for their crops are at record-high levels, Collins said, Congress is trying to raise price support levels and target prices.

The subsidy challenges by U.S. trading partners have been lodged through the World Trade Organization. A WTO ruling in December slammed the U.S. for not sufficiently complying with an earlier ruling that cotton subsidies need to be curtailed.

Substantial counter-cyclical farm payments and marketing-assistance loan programs are still under fire, Collins said, and Congress’ proposals don’t address the problems.

“Under the House and Senate farm bill proposals,” he said, “they do not reform domestic programs in a way that would eliminate such challenges and, in fact, they may aggravate such challenges.”

The United States also faces yet another possible challenge through the WTO. Upon request by Canada and Brazil, the WTO opened an investigation in December into whether the United States has exceeded its ceiling on trade-distorting subsidies for corn, cotton, soybeans and other farm commodities.

Brazil and Canada, according to news reports, asked for the WTO investigation after failing to get the U.S. to limit subsidies in the ongoing WTO Doha Round of trade talks.

U.S. lawmakers, Collins said in the interview, are still working under the U.S. interpretation of constraints agreed on in the 1994 Uruguay Round trade pact, not in the spirit of the Doha Round. The Uruguay Round was agreed on under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, which became the WTO.

Immediately after 9-11 the U.S. government began barking orders to the world, especially to the Muslim world. Perhaps echoing unconsciously the Christian scripture passages Matthew 12:30 and Luke 11:23, it proclaimed, “Either you are with us, or with the terrorists.” Remember those terrifying days, of omnipresent institutionalized ritualistic grief, anger and mandated unity, when any questioning was met with official indignation, threats, or punishment? When everything was supposed to be so clear? When above all, the national need to attack somebody—some Muslims—was supposed to be obvious, and the attack on Afghanistan in particular framed as common sense?

In Afghanistan, the Taliban was told that Washington would not distinguish between terrorists and the regimes that harbor them. The Taliban was of course one of the fundamentalist Islamist groups emerging from the long U.S. effort (1979-93) to topple the Soviet-supported secular regime. The Taliban in power from 1996 had netted some aid from a Washington deeply interested in Afghan oil pipeline construction, and also received aid and diplomatic support from Pakistan. Pakistan’s CIA (the Inter-Service Intelligence or ISI) had helped create the Taliban in order (as Benazir Bhutto later explained) to secure the trade route into Central Asia.

The Taliban, then with U.S. aid suppressing opium poppy production with extraordinary success, and manifesting no special hostility towards Washington, was ordered to hand over 9-11 mastermind Osama bin Ladin. But Pashtun culture (far more than most cultures) mandates that guests receive hospitality and protection, and bin Ladin, a periodic visitor from 1984 and permanent resident since 1996, was no ordinary guest. He had raised or supplied from his personal funds millions of dollars for the anti-Soviet Mujahadeen (which one must always emphasize was supported by him as well as the U.S.), and fought against the secular “socialist” Afghan regime in the name of Islam. Taliban leader Mullah Omar could not simply turn him over to the Americans and maintain any credibility with his own social base. On the other hand, the Taliban did not wish to provoke an invasion. So the Afghans asked for evidence of bin Ladin’s complicity in the attacks. Washington treated the request as absurd. The Afghans offered to turn bin Ladin over to an international court of Islamic jurists. The U.S. reiterated its demand that bin Ladin be transferred to American authorities immediately, knowing this was not going to happen and that it would thus have a popularly accepted casus belli.

Meanwhile Pakistan’s dictator-president Gen. Pervez Musharraf was told by the U.S. State Department that Pakistan must cut ties to the Taliban. “Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age,” he was told by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, through his deputy Richard Armitage, if he was unwilling to cooperate in the destruction of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime. Musharraf was also ordered to host U.S. troops and prevent anti-U.S. demonstrations in his country. Briefly Pakistan protested that it might be better to preserve diplomatic ties with the Taliban government, in order to influence it to cooperate with the U.S. which (one must repeat) had not hitherto had an unfriendly relationship with the U.S. But caving into the U.S. diktat, angering ISI officers deeply invested in Taliban support, risking a coup or assassination, Musharraf complied with U.S. demands. He was rewarded with the removal of U.S. sanctions imposed after Pakistan’s nuclear tests in 1998, and promises of massive aid as the U.S. prepared to bomb Afghanistan, topple the Talibs and impose following their downfall a government of Afghans willing to work with Washington. This of course turned out to be a government dominated by the Northern Alliance, a collection of non-Pashtuns including Uzbek and Tajik warlords hostile to Pakistan and supported by India and Iran.

The U.S. bombed; the Taliban fell, for the most part retreating to ancestral villages and lying low, monitoring the situation, seeking opportunities for resurgence. Few Americans at the time questioned the Bush administration’s ready conflation of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but the two were and are appreciably different. Al-Qaeda is a mostly Arab but multinational global network of Islamists hostile to the U.S. and its policies towards the Muslim world, growing in strength due to the continuation of those policies; the Taliban is a primarily Pashtun organization reflecting traditional Afghan Muslim fundamentalist values and fiercely opposed to foreign domination. The former is sophisticated, headed by well-educated men; the latter is largely illiterate, headed by clerics learned only in Islamic literature. The former wants to attack multiple targets to foment a generalized confrontation between the West and Islam; the latter wants to mind its own house and maintain Afghan traditions with all their xenophobic, medieval, patriarchal, misogynistic, anti-intellectual appeal.

A mix of Taliban militants and al-Qaeda forces resisted the U.S. invasion; hundreds at least escaped into Pakistan’s Federally-Administered Tribal Areas and North-West Frontier Province. Having driven bin Ladin and his followers out of Afghanistan, the U.S. declared a great victory and without skipping a beat moved on to invade and occupy Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9-11. The latter crime inevitably produced outrage globally, but particularly in Muslim countries like Pakistan, where the prestige of bin Ladin, already high in 2001, has soared ever since. (A recent poll showed his approval rating at 46%, compared to Musharraf’s 38% and Bush’s 9%.)

Preoccupied with establishing an empire, U.S. leaders lost interest in al-Qaeda. Indeed in March 2002 President Bush referring to bin Ladin declared, “I truly am not that concerned about him.” As for the al-Qaeda forces in Pakistan (whose very existence close U.S. ally Musharraf denied), they were Pakistan’s problem. The U.S. had unleashed a huge problem on the Pakistani state by invading its neighbor, toppling the Afghan government, and forcing al-Qaeda to relocate into Pakistan where sympathetic tribesmen (who have always resisted firm incorporation into the state) offered them safe haven. Pashtuns straddle the boundary of the two countries; Pakistani Pashtuns are largely sympathetic to the Taliban, and now a Pakistani Taliban is growing in strength in the Taliban and elsewhere.

Thus the “good war” in Afghanistan preceding the generally discredited war-based-on-lies in Iraq was in fact a very bad war so far as Pakistan was concerned. It brought Afghanistan a new warlord government, in which opium is again the chief commercial crop, prettified by a “democratic” election and the appointment of a longtime CIA contact, Hamid Karzai as president and de facto mayor or Kabul. It is increasingly challenged by the recrudescent Taliban and new recruits who have regained control of much of the south. Karzai from his weak position keeps offering them peace talks, which they reject, demanding the invaders leave before any negotiations.

For the U.S. the “good war” has meant 474 soldiers dead (116 so far this year); “coalition” dead have increased every year since 2003 and almost as many European troops have died during the last two years as Americans. Support for the Afghan mission has declined in Europe as its relevance to “counter-terrorism” becomes increasingly unclear and its character as an unwinnable counterinsurgency effort becomes more apparent.

The war in Afghanistan saddled Musharraf with a mounting Islamist rebellion in the Swat Valley and elsewhere; grave dissatisfaction within the military at the unprecedented deployment in the frontier provinces (where troops have performed poorly and unenthusiastically against Islamists); and personal unpopularity related both to his ties to the U.S. and to his abuses of power. Adding to his woes, the U.S. military struck targets within his country (without his consent, he claims), and threatened to take further action against Taliban or al-Qaeda forces in Pakistan. Then the Pakistani Chief Justice opposed his bid to run for president again, and needed to be arrested, causing a nasty political crisis. In an embarrassment to Musharraf the Supreme Court ordered the justice’s release. In the meantime supporters of former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif clamored for their return.

The natural thing for a beleaguered strongman to do in such circumstances would be to declare a state of emergency and assume emergency powers. But the U.S. State Department told him no, don’t do that, let Bhutto come back, work out some accommodation with her. Let the two of you share power and erect an anti-terrorist united front. So Musharraf hesitated until November, when he did indeed declare a state of emergency, meeting with Washington’s public disapproval. The U.S. threatened to cut off some non-military aid if he didn’t quickly lift martial law and hold elections in which Bhutto might compete. Musharraf negotiated with Bhutto, trading cancellation of corruption charges against her for his agreement to respect the constitutional provision that disallowed him to be both president and military officer at the same time.

Quite possibly Musharraf was thinking, “These people, who have already done so much to destabilize Pakistan, now want to destabilize it further by forcing me into this.” But he did, and Bhutto got killed, maybe by his people (cui bono?), maybe by al-Qaeda, maybe by homegrown Islamists angered by Bhutto’s Washington ties, which are even more intimate than Musharraf’s.

Maybe Musharraf will now cancel the election. Maybe he will hold it, arranging to win big. Either way, Washington analysts agree his position is weakened by the assassination. Pakistan, more or less stable as of 2001, has in the interval been knocked off balance by U.S. action in the region. Told it must be for or against the U.S., it was obliged to obey, with grim results.

Unprecedented militant Islamism. Unprecedented support for bin Ladin and al-Qaeda. Unprecedented support for the Taliban. Unprecedented Taliban-like attacks on Buddhist monuments, parts of Pakistan’s cultural heritage. The assassination of a popular pro-Western political figure on whom the U.S. State Department had placed its bets. Anti-Musharraf rioting in the wake of the assassination. Dire consequences indeed of Musharraf’s alliance.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch’s merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.