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The Dead-Enders: Being a neocon means never having to say you’re sorry
by Justin Raimondo

Christopher Hitchens isn’t sorry. Not about being a Commie all those years ago; after all, he was a Trotskyite, not one of those icky Stalinists, which merits a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. Not about being frequently drunk in public: after all, it’s part of his image as the Courtney Love of punditry. And, most of all, he’s not sorry about doing his bit to gin up the Iraq war:

“Four years after the first coalition soldiers crossed the Iraqi border, one can attract pitying looks (at best) if one does not take the view that the whole engagement could have been and should have been avoided. Those who were opposed to the operation from the beginning now claim vindication, and many of those who supported it say that if they had known then what they know now, they would have spoken or voted differently.

“What exactly does it mean to take the latter position? At what point, in other words, ought the putative supporter to have stepped off the train?”

Instead of stepping off the train, the neocons – and Hitchens most of all – have stepped in front of it. In terms of their own credibility, what they did was the equivalent of lying down on the tracks and letting the train run over them. By staking their reputations as serious commentators on the success of a war that Gen. William E. Odom trenchantly and accurately described as the greatest strategic disaster in American military history, they have ensured their place in the pantheon of mistaken prognosticators, along with the inventors of phrenology and the makers of the Edsel.

Oh, a few have recanted, most notably and sincerely Francis Fukuyama. The rest, particularly Kenneth “Cakewalk” Adelman and, most obnoxiously, Andrew Sullivan, have taken to blaming President Bush’s supposedly inconsistent and even halfhearted effort to implement their grand theories – much like Trotsky’s disciples blamed Stalin’s “counter-revolutionary” shortcomings for the inconsistent implementation of the Marxist-Leninist grand design. Hitchens, who has been both a Trot and a warmonger, is a particularly hard case: a dead-ender, in short, who stubbornly sticks to the Revealed Truth even as reality rudely intrudes.

Hitchens sets up a phony dialogue between himself and his interlocutors and lobs himself a lot of softball questions, which he disposes of with his characteristic disdain for facts. It’s as if Scooter Libby had cross-examined himself. How pathetic that a writer who used to be so interesting and fun to read, even if one disagreed with him, has descended to this very threadbare bag of tricks.

Hitchens first raises a fundamentally phony question: Oh, but didn’t Saddam violate a whole bunch of UN resolutions? Wasn’t the credibility of the UN at stake? Why Americans should care about the UN, or why the U.S. military should be put at the disposal of the Security Council, is never made clear. Besides which, if we set up a mechanism whereby an invasion is automatically launched against any country that violates a given number of UN resolutions, we’d have bombed Tel Aviv long ago. At any rate, I don’t recall Hitchens being much of a UN fan to begin with, but I guess when your back’s against the wall any maneuver will do.

It was “correct,” insists Hitchens, to send U.S. forces to the Gulf, because only the threat of force caused the Iraqis to cave on the inspections issue. So Hitchens admits the Iraqis were ready to comply with the UN demand to admit inspectors without conditions – what he doesn’t admit is that the U.S. thwarted Saddam’s pathetic attempts to effectively surrender, and instead launched a series of provocations designed to torpedo a negotiated settlement. Aside from that, however, the very act of sending military forces to the Gulf made war a foregone conclusion: by that time, the president had invested so much of his own political capital – and America’s prestige – in this misadventure that the administration could argue that backing down now, even a little bit, would do irreparable damage to our credibility. Such an argument was, of course, completely unreasonable, but in the Bizarro World we had fallen into post-9/11 – and are only now showing signs of climbing out of – such illogic is perversely “logical.”

Hitchens throws himself a few more underhand pitches, all centered on the question of Iraq’s degree of cooperation with the UN inspectors, but he never addresses the overarching reality, which is that there weren’t any “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. Period. As Scott Ritter pointed out long ago in an article in Arms Control Today, the Iraqis had been disarmed by the stringent UN inspections regime and would not be able to reconstitute it. Whether Saddam tried to wriggle out of the straightjacket imposed by the IAEA is irrelevant: what matters is that – contrary to what Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Hitchens were telling us at the time – he didn’t succeed.

Read the rest here.

Where are the Laptop Bombardiers Now?
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Pick almost any date on the calendar and it’ll turn out that the US either started a war, ended a war, perpetrated a massacre or sent its UN Ambassador into the Security Council to declare to issue an ultimatum. It’s like driving across the American West. “Historic marker, 1 mile”, the sign says. A minute later you pull over and find yourself standing on dead Indians. “On this spot, in 1879 Major T and a troop of US cavalry “

It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, Sunday March 18, one day short of the anniversary of US planes embarking on an aerial hunt of Pancho Villa in 1916;of the day the U.S. Senate rejected (for the second time) the Treaty of Versailles in 1920; of the end of the active phase of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2002; of the 10 pm broadcast March 19, 2003, by President G.W. Bush announcing that aerial operations against Iraq had commenced.

This was the attack on Dora Farms outside Baghdad where some Iraqi whispered into his phone that Saddam Hussein was visiting his children. Down hurtled four 2000-pound bunker-busters and 40 cruise missiles. There were high fives in the White House situation room at news of a mangled Saddam being hauled from the rubble. It all turned out to be nonsense, like most military bulletins out of Iraq. The bunker busters all missed the compound. Saddam Hussein wasn’t there. Uday and Qusay weren’t there. Fifteen civilians died, including nine women and a child.

Here I was, a couple of days shy of four years later, in a used paperback store in a mall in Olympia, Washington, flicking through Tina Turner’s side of the story on life with Ike. My cell phone rang. It was my brother Patrick, calling from Sulaimaniyah, three hours drive east through the mountains from the Kurdish capital of Arbil, in northern Iraq. He gave me a brisk précis of the piece he’d file the next day. Every road was lethally dangerous; every Iraqi he met had a ghastly tale to tell of murder, kidnappings, terror-stricken flights, searches for missing relatives. Life was measurably far, far worse for the vast majority of Iraqis than it had been before the 2003 onslaught. He’d talked that day to Kassim Naji Salaman, a truck driver replacing his murdered brother at the wheel of an oil tanker. Salaman was now the sole bread earner for 18 women and children because so many of his male relatives had been killed “I can’t even visit the village where they live,” he told Patrick. “Soldiers or militia or just men in masks might kill me. I don’t even know how to send them money”.

I’ve had many such phone calls from Patrick since March 2003, as he returned time after time to Iraq, either to Baghdad or to the north. Unlike the embedded reporters he’s never felt moved to announce a “turning point”, as when they blew away Uday and Qusay on July 22,2003. CNN’s studio generals said on the news that night it was a big blow to the Iraqi resistance. Then Saddam was hauled out of a hole on December 15, 2003, just in time for Christmas. Maybe the death knell of the resistance, the studio generals exulted. Then came one “new dawn” for Iraq after another: the handback of Iraqi sovereignty in June 2004, the two elections and the new constitution in 2005. Now we have the “surge” into Baghdad, designed to whip the Shi’a back into line.

Contemptuous of all such bulletins, right from the start Patrick has relentlessly described the disintegration of Iraq, by measurements large and small. Remember that 13 years of sanctions ­- a horrible international onslaught of the health and well-being of a civilian population, enthusiatically supported by liberals in the US and Europe ­- Iraq’s plight was already dire. When the war began, Baghdad had 20 hours of power a day. Now it’s down to 2. Not thousands, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died. Not hundreds of thousands but two million have fled the country, mostly to Syria and Jordan. It’s the largest upheaval of a population in the Middle East since the Palestinian Naqba of 1948. Dawn after dawn rises over Iraq to reveal tortured corpses in the river beds, on the rubbish dumps, by the side of the road: bodies riddled with bullets, punctured by drills, whipped with wire cable, blown apart.

The U.N. says that in the two months before this last Christmas 5,000 Iraqi civilians were killed. The months since have probably been as bad. Saddam dragged his country into ruin. Then the US took it from ruin to the graveyard, plundering the corpse as it did so.

There’s plenty of blame to go round. You’d think these days that the cheerleaders for war were limited to a platoon of neocons, as potent in historical influence as were supposedly the Knights Templar. But it was not so. The coalition of the enablers spread far beyond Cheney’s team and the extended family of Norman Podhoretz. Atop mainstream corporate journalism perch the New York Times and the New Yorker, two prime disseminators of pro-invasion propaganda, written at the NYT by Judith Miller, Michael Gordon and, on the op ed page, by Thomas Friedman. The New Yorker put forth the voluminous lies of Jeffrey Goldberg and has remained impenitent till this day.

The war party virtually monopolized television. AM radio poured out a filthy torrent of war bluster. The laptop bombardiers such as Salman Rushdie were in full war paint. Among the progressives the liberal interventionists thumped their tin drums, often by writing pompous pieces attacking the antiwar “hard left”. Mini-pundits Todd Gitlin and Michael Berube played this game eagerly. Berube lavished abuse on Noam Chomsky and other clear opponents of the war, mumbling about the therapeutic potential of great power interventionism, piously invoking the tradition of “left internationalism”. Others, like Ian Williams, played supportive roles in instilling the idea that the upcoming war was negotiable, instead of an irreversible intent of the Bush administration, no matter what Saddam Hussein did. “The ball will be very much in Saddam Hussein’s court,” Williams wrote in November, 2002. “The question is whether he will cooperate and disarm, or dissimulate and bring about his own downfall at the hands of the U.S. military.” (In fact Saddam had already “disarmed”, as disclosed in Hussein Kamel’s debriefings by the UNSCOM inspectors, the CIA and MI6 in the summer of 1995 when Kamel told them all, with corroboration from aides who had also defected, that on Saddam Hussein’s orders his son-in-law had destroyed all of Iraq’s WMDs years earlier, right after the Gulf War. This was not a secret. In February 2003 John Barry reported it in Newsweek.Anyone privy to the UNSCOM, CIA and MI6 debriefs knew it from 1995 on.)

As Iraq began to plunge ever more rapidly into the abyss not long after the March, 2003 attack, this crowd stubbornly mostly stayed the course with Bush. “Thumpingly blind to the war’s virtues” was the head on a Paul Berman op ed piece in February, 2004.Christopher Hitchens lurched regularly onto Hardball to hurl abuse at critics of the war.

But today, amid Iraq’s dreadful death throes, where are the parlor warriors? Have those Iraqi exiles reconsidered their illusions, that all it would take was a brisk invasion and a new constitution, to put Iraq to rights? Have any of them, from Makiya through Hitchens to Berman and Berube had dark nights, asking themselves just how much responsibility they have for the heaps of dead in Iraq, for a plundered nation, for the American soldiers who died or were crippled in Iraq at their urging ? Sometimes I dream of them, — Friedman, Hitchens, Berman — like characters in a Beckett play, buried up to their necks in a rubbish dump on the edge of Baghdad, reciting their columns to each other as the local women turn over the corpses to see if one of them is her husband or her son.

Post coldwar Liberal interventionism came of age with the onslaught on Serbia. Liberal support for the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq were the afterglows. Now that night has descended and illusions about the great crusade shattered for ever, let us tip our hats to those who opposed this war from the start ­ the real left, the libertarians and those without illusions about the “civilizing mission” of the great powers.

Read it here.

Bush and the Psychology of Incompetent Decisions
By John P. Briggs, MD, and J.P. Briggs II – Truthout
Mar 22, 2007, 17:51

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Editorial Comment: There is only thing missing from this otherwise exemplary analysis of the mind and behavior of George W. Bush. It is the absence, if not direct negation – of the people who have been exploiting Bush’s incompetence from behind the scenes. While their article provides important insight into the mind and behavior of George W. Bush, the authors imbue him with power that clearly lies outside his ability or grasp. The deep penetration of executive decision-making inside the White House by “think tanks” like the Council on Foreign Relations, American Enterprise Institute and Project for New American Century is well-known.

The Office of Special Plans created inside the Pentagon for the purpose of building a case for war on Iraq and feeding false information to Bush about WMD, Al Queda, etc. provides an obvious example of how important foreign policy decisions are made. Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, John Bolton, James Woolsley, Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Elliot Abrams, Robert Kagan, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, Frank Gaffney, Joshua Muravchic, Daniel Pipes and their media apologists (e.g. William Kristol) are the known architects of the war in Iraq and are now pushing the U.S. government for another war against the people of Iran, another Israeli target.

Lest we forget, it was Kenneth Adelman, a member of Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board who wrote for the Washington Post in 2002:

“I believe demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.”

It was David Frum a former speechwriter for President Bush who allegedly coined the phrase “axis of evil”.

Authors of the article below, John P. Briggs, MD, and J.P. Briggs II, PhD, skoff at “speculation” that Dick Cheney is one of Bush’s puppeteers. The authors state: “Bush is the president; he gets his way, and they know it” … and even suggest that Cheney himself is a victim of the “Stockholm Syndrome”, vis-a-vis a victim of Bush himself.

Of course Bush is the unstable bully whose intra-psychic processes are described so well by the authors of this article. There is no doubt that he bullies the White House staff and others on a personal level – as a cover for his own emotional insecurity and worsening mental status. We can even agree that his psychopathology feeds into policy-making and is exploited by the policy-makers. But he architecture and execution of domestic and foreign policy clearly comes from outside the Oval Office, using George W. Bush as a patsy when things turn public against the interests of the people of the United States. We now see the architects of the Iraq war turning against Bush via the corporate media at the behest of those who made him president. We now watch as they crawl into the woodwork, first offering up Rumsfeld as the cause of the slaughter and now leaving Bush holding the bag with the Democrats standing in the wings – recipients of $250 million from AIPAC and the spoils of the bloody war they funded. A perfect crime? Only if we let them get away with it.

Finally, it is interesting that the power-elite are now using the Valerie Plame affair and the firing of Federal Prosecutors to burn Bush instead of pressing for an indictment for his war crimes as we see happening this week in the International Court in the Hague. Despite imputing gratuitous power to George W. Bush, within their area of expertise (psychiatry), authors John P. Briggs, MD, and J.P. Briggs II, PhD, provide important insight with their excellent analysis into the crippling parental influence, emotional instability and twisted thought processes of the president. – Les Blough, Editor

© Copyright 2007 by AxisofLogic.com
Thursday 18 January 2007

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President George W. Bush prides himself on “making tough decisions.” But many are sensing something seriously troubling, even psychologically unbalanced, about the president as a decision-maker. They are right.

Because of a psychological dynamic swirling around deeply hidden feelings of inadequacy, the president has been driven to make increasingly incompetent and risky decisions. This dynamic makes the psychological stakes for him now unimaginably high. The words “success” and “failure” have seized his rhetoric like metaphors for his psyche’s survival.

The president’s swirling dynamic lies “hidden in plain sight” in his personal history. From the time he was a boy until his religious awakening in his early 40s, Bush had every reason to feel he was a failure. His continued, almost obsessive, attempts through the years to emulate his father, obtain his approval, and escape from his influence are extensively recorded.

His biography is peppered with remarks and behavior that allude to this inner struggle. In an exuberant moment during his second campaign for Texas governor, Bush told a reporter, “It’s hard to believe, but … I don’t have time to worry about being George Bush’s son. Maybe it’s a result of being confident. I’m not sure how the psychoanalysts will analyze it, but I’m not worried about it. I’m really not. I’m a free guy.”

A psychoanalyst would note that he is revealing here that he has been worrying about being his father’s son quite a lot.

Resentment naturally contaminated Bush’s efforts to prove himself to his father and receive his father’s approval. The contradictory mix showed up in his compulsion to re-fight his father’s war against Iraq, but this time winning the duel some thought his father failed to win with Saddam. He could at once emulate his father, show his contempt for him, and redeem him. But beneath this son-father struggle lies a far more significant issue for Bush – a question about his own competence, adequacy and autonomy as a human being.

We have seen this inner question surface repeatedly, and we have largely conspired with him to deny it.

* On September 11, 2001, we saw (and suppressed) the image of him sitting stunned for seven minutes in a crowd of school children after learning that the second plane had hit the Twin Towers, and then the lack of image of him when he vanished from public view for the rest of the day. Instead, we bought the cover-up image, three days after the attack, of the strong leader, grabbing the bullhorn in New York City and issuing bellicose statements.

* In 2004, we saw and denied the insecurity displayed when the president refused to face the 9/11 Commission alone and needed Vice President Cheney to go with him.

* In 2003, we saw and suppressed the dark side of the “Mission Accomplished” aircraft carrier landing, in which a man who had ducked out on his generation’s war and dribbled away his service in the Texas Air National Guard dressed up like Top Gun and pretended that he was a combat pilot like his father.

* Asked by a reporter if he would accept responsibility for any mistakes, Bush answered, “I hope I don’t want to sound like I’ve made no mistakes. I’m confident I have. I just haven’t – you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I’m not quick – as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.” What we heard, and yet didn’t hear, was a confession of his feelings of inadequacy and an arrogant denial those feelings all at once.

* In early 2006, when his father moved behind the scenes to replace Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the son responded, “I’m the decider and I decide what’s best” – and when he clenched his fist at a question about his father’s influence, proclaiming, “I’m the Commander in Chief” – we glimpsed what was going on.

To cover up and defend himself against his feelings of his inadequacy and incompetence, Bush developed a number of psychological defenses. In his school years he played the clown. (His ability to joke about his verbal slip-ups is an endearing adult application of this defense to public life.) His heavy drinking was a classic way to anesthetize feelings of inadequacy. Indeed, drinking typically makes the alcoholic grandiose, which has led some commentators to argue that Bush has the “dry drunk” syndrome, where the individual has stopped drinking but retains the brittle psychology of the alcoholic. Other defenses now play especially powerful roles to protect the president against his internal feelings of insufficiency.

The Christian Defense

Bush has carefully let it be known that he believes the decisions he makes in office are directed by God. His famous claim to make decisions by “gut” (“I’m a gut player,” he told Bob Woodward) equates with his claim of the spiritual inspiration he receives through prayer, his own and the prayers of others. Whatever else it is, this equation of his own choices with God’s will has unparalleled advantages. It creates the perfect defense against any doubts he or anyone else might have that he can’t make the right decision. The need to engage in analysis and explore alternatives to get there comes off the table. Instead, he has his gut; he has his God.

Being “born again” also allows the president to present himself as having relegated to the past all those previously inadequate behaviors of his younger days: the poor academic performance, the drinking, the failed businesses. He’s a new man, no longer incompetent but now supremely competent as a result of his faith.

When Woodward asked Bush if he had consulted his father before invading Iraq, he replied, “He is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to.” How wonderfully that appeal must seem to resolve the internal conflict about adequacy we have described above.

The Bully Defense

Bush’s mother, Barbara (sarcastic, mean, disciplinarian, always with an acid-tongued retort), is probably the model for another major defense Bush deploys to defend himself against feelings of inadequacy. A friend at the time described her as “sort of the leader bully.”

That bullies are insecure people is well known and fairly obvious. A bully covers insecurity with bluster and intimidation so that others won’t find an opening to see how weak he feels.

Much of the world outside the US considers Bush a bully. “You’re either with us or against us” is a bully’s threat that anyone can recognize. The Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strikes is a bully’s doctrine.

For his intimates and those closer to home, Bush appears to be what is called an emotional bully. An emotional bully gains control using sarcasm, teasing, mocking, name calling, threatening, ignoring, lying, or angering the other and forcing him to back down. Bush administration insider accounts describe this sort of behavior from the president. He’s well known for his dismissive remarks. His penchant for giving nicknames to everyone has its dark, bully’s side. Naming people is a way to control them.

In report by Gail Sheehy in 2000, recalled recently by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, we get a glimpse of how Bush’s pervasive fear of failure (his absolute refusal to consider “failure as an option”) and his bully defense go together. Sheehy interviewed friends from his teenage years and college years. In basketball or tennis games he would insist points be played over because he wasn’t ready; he would force opponents who had beaten him to continue playing until he beat them. At Yale he would interrupt his fellow students’ studying for exams (helping them fail) to compete in a popular board game, “The Game of Global Domination,” at which he was the player noted for taking the most risks, being the most aggressive.

It’s likely that speculations about Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice functioning as Bush’s puppet-masters are 180 (or at least 160) degrees off. Bush is the president; he gets his way, and they know it. Chances are they have learned to channel his “gut” and give him policy advice that matches it. They may even imagine they are steering him, not clear about the ways that he has bullied them, elicited in them “The Stockholm Syndrome,” in which hostages come to identify with and even defend the very person who is threatening them. This is the same dynamic evident in the behavior of battered spouses and members of gangs.

Ron Suskind described the small group around the president: “A disdain for contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness – a sometimes bullying impatience with doubters and even friendly questioners.”

Biographical reports tell us that Bush’s parents taught him to keep his inner feelings to himself. As psychiatrist Justin A. Frank noted in Bush on the Couch, this results in a “self-protective indifference to the pain of others.” This is another aspect of his bully defense, projecting his inner pain onto others. Bush’s remarkable drive for the power to torture terrorist suspects and his reported glorying in Texas executions during his terms as governor testify to his lack of compassion, despite his recent statement of qualms about seeing Saddam Hussein drop through the trap.

The Man of Splits and Oppositions

Being in the world, for all of us, involves the challenge to somehow integrate the opposites of our nature and to select our way through the many opposing choices presented us in life. The bully polarizes the natural ambivalence (the internal opposition) anyone feels about whether he is strong or weak, safe or vulnerable. A person who needs to feel invulnerable and completely adequate all the time, or who always feels helpless and inadequate, has polarized these emotions and leads a deformed life. The degree of internal polarization in President Bush appears to be serious – and widespread. Commentators have made lists of the president’s polarities: the proclaimed uniter who is a relentless divider, the habit of “saying one thing and doing another,” as Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords put it. The list is long and growing. It should include the oppositions that show up in his famous Bushisms, such as:

There is no doubt in my mind that we should allow the world’s worst leaders to hold America hostage, to threaten our peace, to threaten our friends and allies with the world’s worst weapons.

They [the terrorists] never stop thinking of ways to harm our country and our people – and neither do we.

To a psychiatrist, these are not mere malapropisms and mistakes in speech. They suggest ambivalence oscillating violently between poles. They suggest a desperate uncertainty about everything that the president reflexively seeks to hide by taking absolutist, rigid positions about “victory,” “success,” “mission accomplished,” “stay the course,” “compassion,” “tax cuts,” “no child left behind,” and a host of other issues.

The Presidential Defense

Once Bush took the bullhorn at ground zero, he found perhaps the ultimate defense for his secret fears of inadequacy. As he told Bob Woodward, in Bush at War, “I’m the commander – see, I don’t need to explain – I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.” As commander in chief, as a war president, he could assemble his other psychological defenses around him. He could split the world into good and evil and the country would follow. His internal oppositions could be projected without much resistance from the populace or his adversaries. He could be the gut-led, divinely inspired “Decider,” to save the country. He could project own internal fears of being “discovered as a fraud” into a threat “out there” waiting to happen. He could surround himself with loyalists whom he could emotionally bully, creating a new family that would admire him and that he could control. Meanwhile the ambiguities of political decisions that can always be rationalized offer a safe haven. Until history judges me (and that’s a long way off, maybe never) I can’t be definitively seen as incompetent.

But as much as the presidency is a perfect defense for disguising incompetence, it’s also the perfect trap. It accelerates the positive feedback loop that was set in motion when he “changed his heart” around age 40 (committing himself to God) and presumably put his failures, and his feelings of failure behind him.

In recent weeks, anyone following the news must have intuitively sensed from watching and hearing the president that he would reject the Iraq Study Group’s report, co-authored by a person he must have felt was the emissary of his father come to tell him that he had failed again. He chose escalation, the one solution most knowledgeable people agree cannot succeed, in order to keep alive the fiction that success still lies in the future.

The dynamic is becoming obvious to almost everybody.

But how much is Bush aware of this psychological dynamic and of the secret he’s keeping? Not aware enough. That’s the problem. Psychotherapists use the term “unconscious,” but it isn’t quite an accurate descriptor. We are aware of feelings, sensations and scripts that occur when one of our unseen psychic mechanisms is triggered. So, when an interviewer asked about the generals who demanded Rumsfeld be removed, and the president knew his father had been working behind the scenes to replace Rumsfeld, the question would not have triggered the conscious thought: there goes dad again trying to make me feel incompetent. Instead, the president may have felt a hollow sensation or a flush of anger, an urge to form a clownish grin to cover his watery feelings, and a script that would come out of his mouth as “I’m the decider.” Beneath that would be the inadequacy and cover-up dynamic outlined here.

A president’s psychology and his inner secrets are his or her own business, except in one important area. That is area covered by the question, “Does the psychology of this individual interfere with his or her ability to make sound decisions in the best interest of the nation?” Recent history has certainly been witness to presidents with psychodynamics that have damaged their historical legacies. Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon come to mind. But in neither case was the very ability to make sound decisions compromised to the extent we believe it is with this president.

A Failed Process

Many accounts of the president suggest that his decision-making process is a failed one; in an important sense, it is no process at all.

Ambivalent feelings are normal at certain stages of decision-making, and the ability to tolerate ambivalence has been shown to be the hallmark of creative thinkers. The inability to tolerate uncertainty because you think that may imply incapacity brings decision-making to an end.

Thus, instead of focusing on the process needed to arrive at a decision, Bush marshals his defenses in order not to feel incompetent. That doesn’t leave much room for exploring the alternatives required of competent decision-making. Not interested in discussion or detail (where the devil often lies), he seeks something minimal, just enough so he can let the decision come to him; it’s his “gut” (read “God”) that will provide the answer. But these gut feelings are the very feelings associated with his deep sense of inadequacy and his defenses against those feelings. So while he brags that he makes the “tough decisions,” psychologically, he’s defending himself against the very feelings of uncertainty that are the necessary concomitant to making tough decisions. His tough decision-making is a sham.

In the recent maneuvering toward the “new strategy” in Iraq, we have witnessed a great pretense of normal decision-making. But the president clearly made up his mind almost as soon as the “surge” alternative appeared, and apparently moved to cow others, including his new secretary of defense Robert Gates (his father’s man) in the process. “Success” is the only alternative for him. “Failure” and disintegration of Iraq is unthinkable because it would be synonymous with his own internal disintegration.

As his decisions go awry, he exudes a troubling, uncanny aura of certitude (though some find it reassuring). He seems to expect to feel despised and alone (and probably has always felt that), as he has always secretly expected to fail. That expectation of failure leads to sloppy, risky, incompetent decisions, which in turn compel him to swerve from his fears of incompetence.

At this point, the president seems to have entered a place in his psyche where he is discounting all external criticism and unpopularity, and fixing stubbornly on his illusion of vindication, because he’s still “The Decider,” who can just keep deciding until he gets to success. It’s hard not to feel something heroic in this position – but it’s a recipe for bad, if not catastrophic, decisions.

Psychologically, President Bush has received support for so long because many have thought of him as “one of us.” Most of us feel inadequate in some way, and watching him we can feel his inadequacies and sense his uncertainties, so we admire him for “pulling it off.” His model tells us, “If you act like you’re confident and competent, then you are.” We are the culture that values the power of positive thinking and seeks assertiveness training. We believe that the right attitude can sometimes be more important than brains or hard work. He’s bullied us, too. We don’t dare to really confront the scale of his incompetent behavior, because then we would have to face what it means to have such an incompetent and psychologically disabled decision-maker as our president. It raises everyone’s uncertainty. And that is, in fact, happening now.

John P. Briggs, MD, is retired from over 40 years of private practice in psychotherapy in Westchester County, New York. He was on the faculty in psychiatry at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City for 23 years and was a long-time member of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. He trained at the William Alanson White Institute in New York. J.P. Briggs II, PhD, is a Distinguished CSU professor at Western Connecticut State University and is the senior editor of the intellectual journal The Connecticut Review. He is author and co-author of books on creativity and chaos, including Fire in the Crucible (St. Martin’s Press); Fractals, the Patterns of Chaos (Simon and Schuster); and Seven Life Lessons of Chaos (HarperCollins), among others. He is currently at work with Philadelphia psychologist John Amoroso on a book about the power of ambivalence in the creative process.

Source: www.truthout.org

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Latin American – delusion and reality
by toni solo
March 23, 2007

The irony of attacks on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez by cynical, sadistic country-wreckers like Condoleezza Rica and John Negroponte can be lost only on them. While Venezuela advances steadily towards prosperity and social equity, the Bush regime commits its extraordinary rendition of the US people to military disaster and falling living standards. Speaking to a Congressional hearing on February 7th this year, Rice declared, “”I do believe that the president of Venezuela is really, really destroying his own country, economically, politically.”(1)

People walked out on the fictional Captain Queeg (2) when he took out some silver balls on the court martial witness stand and proceeded to fidget with them as his testimony collapsed into paranoid mumblings. In real life, Prince of Delusion George W. Bush, has yet to face outright mutiny from his fellow dysfunctional political leaders. Presumably the motley corporate-behoven crew running the single party US ship of State are waiting until they and the rest of the world are in the lifeboats.

In Latin America people may be more tuned-in to reality. When respected mainstream political analyst and historian Luiz Moniz Bandeira publicy affirms that Brazil sees a US invasion of Amazonia as its main external military threat, the Bush regime’s jaded-Reaganaut State Department’s “freedom and democracy” rhetoric has clearly lost whatever slap-it-on-thick-maybe-they’ll-never-notice credibility it ever had. Although Bandeira discounts the likelihood of such an invasion, he says it is the main premise for the Brazilian army’s strategic planning. He notes, the US military “does not exist to defend its national frontiers but rather for planetary domination and aggression to secure sources of energy and raw materials.” (3)

Shifting the perspective

It is now commonplace to argue that the US government is engaged in a losing battle to defend its waning prestige and influence in Latin America. Only the spell of North America’s habitual narcissism renders that interpretation of much interest. Looked at from south of the Rio Grande, the potential breadth and depth of imperial collapse is perhaps less interesting than the nature, scale and ambition of the integration processes under way. If the US has lost influence, the wider imperialist global corporate Thing seems to have adapted well, mutating fast to continue its parasitic gorging on the peoples of Latin America.

Even so, when Captain Queeg toured five Latin American countries recently, his tour underlined the comprehensive failure of his regime’s feints at regional leadership. Serious high level visits by Chinese and Russian political leaders contrast with the contemptible, stagnant “do what we want, or else” corporate arrogance of US govenment diplomacy. In that context, the fact that China has prioritised Ecuador and Bolivia for increased oil and gas investment incentives to Chinese companies (4) is very much worth noting. When Russian and Chinese leaders visit Latin America they are pushing at a door to the imperial Bluebeard’s Castle the US government left poorly guarded, now prised wide open by the peoples once prisoners inside.

President Putin of Russia visited Cuba in 2000 and Mexico, Brazil and Chile in 2004. Chinese President Hu Jintao also made an extensive visit to Latin America in 2004. Russian Prime Minister Mijail Fradkov visited Brazil, Argentina and Chile in 2006. Just prior to Queeg’s Latin American jaunt, Russia’s vice-Foreign Minister Serguei Kisliak declared during a speech in Uruguay to the Association for Latin American Integration on March 9th “Russia wants to increase political and economic cooperation with the countries of Latin America”. (5)

The changing compass of Latin American diplomacy and the deep political conflicts its competing integration initiatives have engendered also indicate the extent to which people in Latin America are focusing on their own needs, leaving the North American imperial corporate plutocrat elite and their local allies to negotiate from relative weakness. 2007 has a sparse electoral calendar compared to the 2006 flurry of presidential elections. But the elections in Guatemala in November and those in Argentina in October will probably reveal a great deal about the durability of current trends against the legacy of twenty years of Washington Consensus economic policy, the latest stage in five centuries of colonial subjugation.

Read the rest here.

Here’s another of those “lackluster services” to which CNN, the dog of the mealy state mouthpiece, was referring yesterday.

Shortage of safe water risks cholera in Iraq -U.N.
Thu Mar 22, 2007 2:35PM EDT
By Suleiman al-Khalidi

AMMAN, March 22 (Reuters) – United Nations agencies working in Iraq warned on Thursday a chronic shortage of safe drinking water risks causing more child deaths and an outbreak of waterborne disease such as cholera during the summer.

Four years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, millions of Iraqi children still find that safe water is no easier to access, said a statement issued by leading U.N. aid agencies operating in Iraq.

The agencies, whose offices are based in Amman, issued the statement to mark World Water Day.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said shortages of drinking water threatened to push up diarrhoea rates, particularly among children. Diarrhoea is already the second highest cause of child illness and death in Iraq, it said.

“Latest reports suggest we are already seeing an increase in diarrhoea, even before the usual onset of the diarrhoea season in June,” said Roger Wright, UNICEF representative in Iraq.

Efforts to repair Iraq’s damaged water networks have been hampered by electricity shortages, attacks on technicians, infrastructure and engineering works and underinvestment in the water sector, the agencies said.

Iraq was still relying on U.N. support to provide essential water treatment chemicals with UNICEF alone providing 1,650 tonnes of chlorine last year, the statement said.

The suspension of water tankering services to tens of thousands of people in Baghdad, especially to displaced families and communities hosting them, increased the risk of cholera outbreaks, the agencies warned.

“Under the circumstances, Iraq has done extremely well to keep outbreaks of waterborne diseases, especially cholera, largely at bay so far. But this achievement is at risk unless more reliable sources of safe water reach families as soon as possible,” the joint statement said.

Read the rest here.

West Coast African Spicy Chicken and Pean Fritters

This dish was called “Chicken Yassa” by Jessica B. Harris when I saw it one afternoon on the Food Network. I didn’t like the name, so there you go. I made quite a few changes to the chicken recipe and there were no black-eyed pea fritters in her presentation. Ya’ better duck a little when you eat this one.

West Coast African Spicy Chicken

1 2-pound chicken, cut into pieces and trimmed of fat
Salt and pepper to taste
1 large white onion, halved and sliced thin
Juice of 2 large lemons, seeds removed
1/4 cup grapeseed oil
1 habañero chile, pierced several times with a fork
1/2 to 1 teaspoon finely minced habañero chile (optional)

Place onions, lemon juice, and oil (and minced habañero, if using) into a large ceramic or glass bowl, mixing thoroughly. I usually rinse the chicken a little, cleaning the last bits of crud, then pat the pieces dry. Salt and pepper the chicken all over, then nestle chicken pieces into the onions, ensuring pieces are well covered. In the center of the bowl, nestle the pierced habañero chile into the liquid. Marinate, covered with plastic wrap, for 8 to 24 hours in the refrigerator (bigger is better, in this case).

20 kalamata olives, pitted and diced
3 large carrots, cleaned and sliced
1 large ripe tomato, diced
1/2 cup Riesling wine
2 tablespoons spicy mustard (I used New Braunfels Smokehouse Sweet and Spicy Mustard; my other preference would be Keen’s or Coleman’s hot mustard with a teaspoon of honey)

When the chicken has marinated well, remove the pieces to a broiling pan, reserving the onions and liquid. Broil the chicken (or grill over a hot barbeque fire) until golden brown on all sides (about 3 to 5 minutes per side).

While chicken is browning, place onions into a hot, large, lightly-oiled pot and sauté until transparent. Stir in the carrots and olives, sautéing for another couple of minutes. Then add the reserved marinade liquid, tomato, wine, mustard, pierced habañero chile, and browned chicken. Add additional water to half cover chicken only if necessary. Simmer for 35 or 40 minutes, until tender, stirring from time to time. We served this delicious dish with:

Black-Eyed Pea Fritters

1/4 cup dried black-eyed peas
1 cup bottled water

Soak peas in water for three hours (until peas are swollen). Drain water and discard it. Place beans into a small pot and just cover with water and bring to a boil. Turn heat to low and simmer for 30 minutes. Drain beans completely.

1 small white onion, minced
2 small cloves Italian garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon habañero sauce (I like Marie Sharp’s)
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 to 4 teaspoons bottled water

Whisk above ingredients, excepting the water, in a medium bowl. In a separate bowl, mash the cooked and drained peas until soft and “fluffy.”

In the meanwhile, heat about 2 cups of canola, peanut or vegetable oil in an 8-inch deep pot until it reaches 375° F.

Mix the egg mixture into the mashed beans, until even more “fluffy,” adding water as required to make it an easy fritter batter with which to work. Drop single tablespoons of this mixture into the hot oil and deep fry for just 3 to 4 minutes, until crispy. Do not crowd the pot and drain on paper towel.

The sweet / hot mustard and tomato make this a subtle sweet dish, but still spicy. The fritters make a fine complement.

Richard Jehn

Last week, Avaaz campaigners hand-delivered our 100,000-signature climate change petition to the environment ministers of the world’s most polluting countries. It worked. The chair of the meeting waved the petition in the air, calling on his fellow ministers to act–and they agreed that climate change would be the #1 issue at the G8 summit in June.

The momentum is on our side. Let’s build on it. Next Tuesday, another high-level group will meet to move forward with G8 planning — and we can keep the focus on the climate issue by showing that the call for action is growing. Can you help us reach our ambitious goal of 150,000 signatures by Tuesday by forwarding this email to ten friends? Your friends can sign the petition here:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/climate_action_g8

Here’s how our campaigner Iain Keith, who presented the petition, describes his experience:

When my turn came to speak to the Environment ministers, I was so nervous that I thought my voice would quiver. But I wasn’t just speaking for myself–I was there on behalf of 100,000 Avaaz members, and I couldn’t let them down. I walked to the microphone, took a deep breath, and said, “Dear Ministers, ladies and gentlemen, m y name is Iain Keith and I’m here on behalf of the 1 Million members of Avaaz. Avaaz is a new online community where global citizens can go to take action on the biggest issues facing our world. I have here, in my hands, a petition from our members who would like to tell you that they are scared of climate change, and the lack of action being taken. The countries represented in this room are responsible for the majority of global greenhouse gas emissions. As ministers of the environment you are in an excellent position to persuade your leaders to make tackling climate change the number one priority for the next G8 summit. Our members humbly request that you accept this petition as a reminder of your responsibilities, and to help persuade your leaders.”

I handed the petition to the German environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel. The meeting continued, with speeches on other issues from other organizations. I wondered if all of the work had been worth it.

And then came Minister Gabriel’s closing speech.

I could hardly believe it: he was saying that climate change must be the number one priority at the G8 summit. And he was holding our petition.

“Thanks to increased pressure from people around the world,” he said, “the tide is turning. When an international NGO can gather this many signatures” (here he holds up the petition), “we cannot ignore this problem anymore… As Environmental ministers, we have a responsibility both to the environment and our voters to make sure our heads of state act!”

And a few days later, German Chancellor and G8 President Angela Merkel vowed to put climate change at the top of the agenda for the G8 Leaders Summit.

We did it!!

Iain’s right. And we can do even more. Can you forward this email to ten friends, and help us reach our goal of 150,000 signatures by Tuesday?

http://www.avaaz.org/en/climate_action_g8

It’s amazing what can happen when we work together. Thanks for all that you do.

With hope,
Ben, Iain, Ricken, Lee-Sean, Galit, Graziela, and the rest of the Avaaz team

P.S. For a more detailed report of the meeting, including photos, visit the Avaaz blog

Listen to the cynicism from the state parrots. They call having electricity less than 4 hours a day and gasoline that is 10 times the cost it was 4 years ago “lackluster services.”

Report raps poor planning for Iraq reconstruction
POSTED: 4:58 a.m. EDT, March 22, 2007

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Planners for Iraq reconstruction did not anticipate conditions after the 2003 invasion, setting the scene for lackluster services that still plague the country, according to a report by the Pentagon’s inspector.

The report, released Thursday, made nine recommendations for improvements for future nation-building plans by the United States.

Among the suggestions is for Congress to develop better coordination between the Departments of Defense and State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the primary agencies that work with other governments and international agencies.

“There is fairly wide agreement that pre-war planning for relief and reconstruction should have been better, and one of the challenges we are seeing in reviewing that is the interagency problem,” Special Inspector General Stuart Bowen told reporters Wednesday ahead of the report’s release.

The efforts of the Defense Department, USAID and the State Department “bumped into each other,” causing much of the difficulty, Bowen said.

“There was a lack of clarity of roles and responsibility and a lack of effective joint-ness. By that I mean a unity of command, and that needs to be developed before we go to war,” he said.

The initial plan, the new report says, was for an Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) to handle reconstruction efforts. That office’s plan, picked up by the Coalition Provisional Authority in April 2003, was for Iraq to “assume complete sovereignty, including full responsibility for relief and reconstruction efforts” within 12 to 18 months of the start of the war.

Read it here.

Under the laws pushed through by this corrupt regime, YOU COULD BE NEXT !!!

Top-Secret Torture: What’s stopping the Democrats in Congress from investigating?
Tuesday, March 20, 2007; Page A18

KHALID SHEIK Mohammed’s cold-blooded confession of responsibility for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and other horrific crimes before a tribunal in Guantanamo Bay got a lot of attention when the Pentagon released a partial transcript last week — and understandably so. But another set of disclosures by the al-Qaeda leader that could also be sensational received almost no attention. That’s because the Pentagon swiftly classified a document submitted by Mr. Mohammed in which he detailed the torture he says he suffered. The rationale is that disclosure of those allegations would harm national security. In fact, the harm the Bush administration’s abuse of prisoners has already done to this country’s ability to combat Islamic extremism will only be compounded if it succeeds in making this shameful record a state secret.

The administration claims it has not used torture on prisoners such as Mr. Mohammed. Yet it has been working aggressively to ensure that he and 13 other accused terrorists formerly held in secret CIA prisons are never allowed to reveal how they were treated. In addition to classifying Mr. Mohammed’s statement, the administration is making the surreal argument in court that in being subjected to “alternative” interrogation methods, al-Qaeda detainees were receiving top-secret information — and so may be prohibited from ever discussing their experience, even to the defense attorneys seeking to represent them.

The government claims that this looking-glass policy is necessary to prevent al-Qaeda members still at large from learning of the CIA’s methods so that they can train against them. Yet some of the harshest action taken against Mr. Mohammed has already been widely reported: He was treated to “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning, an ancient torture method that every U.S. administration prior to this one has considered illegal. CIA detainees are also known to have been subjected to temperature extremes and sleep deprivation. The administration has assured Congress that it has dropped some of these methods, including waterboarding. If that’s true, Mr. Mohammed’s statement will not alert future detainees, but it will open a debate about whether the CIA’s past practices were legal or morally justifiable.

That is what the administration is really trying to stop. If al-Qaeda members are allowed to talk about the abuse they suffered, President Bush’s frequent contention that no one was tortured will come under question; so will his determination to maintain the CIA’s secret detention “program.” If the administration strategy succeeds, much of the trials and appeals of the al-Qaeda suspects will have to be conducted in secret — something that will strip the proceedings of credibility and legitimacy.

Read the rest here.

And to help emphasize this matter:

Bush Paves the Way for Martial Law: 2007 National Defense Authorization Act overturns Posse Comitatus Act
Global Research, March 21, 2007

“Paradoxically, preserving liberty may require the rule of a single leader–a dictator–willing to use those dreaded ‘extraordinary measures,’ which few know how, or are willing, to employ.” — Michael Ledeen, White House advisor and fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, “Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli’s Iron Rules Are As Timely and Important Today As Five Centuries Ago”

“Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government.” — NewsMax, November 21, 2003

In October 2006, Bush signed into law the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007. Quietly slipped into the law at the last minute, at the request of the Bush administration, were sections changing important legal principles, dating back 200 years, which limit the U.S. government’s ability to use the military to intervene in domestic affairs. These changes would allow Bush, whenever he thinks it necessary, to institute martial law–under which the military takes direct control over civilian administration.

Sec. 1042 of the Act, “Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies,” effectively overturns what is known as posse comitatus. The Posse Comitatus Act is a law, passed in 1878, that prohibits the use of the regular military within the U.S. borders. The original passage of the Posse Comitatus Act was a very reactionary move that sealed the betrayal of Black people after the Civil War and brought the period of Reconstruction to an end. It decreed that federal troops could no longer be used inside the former Confederate states to enforce the new legal rights of Black people. Black people were turned over to the armed police and Klansmen serving the southern plantation owners, and the long period of Jim Crow began.

During the 20th century, posse comitatus objectively started to play a new role within the bourgeois democratic framework: as a legal barrier to the direct influence of the powerful military establishment and the armed forces over domestic U.S. society. It served to some degree as an obstacle against military coups and presidents seizing military control over the country. (However, National Guard troops have been legally available to the ruling class for use inside the U.S., and there have been other loopholes to the prohibition of the use of armed forces domestically, as in the mobilization of Marine troops during the 1992 L.A. Rebellion.)

So the changes to posse comitatus signed into law by Bush are extremely significant and ominous. Bush has modified the main exemptions to posse comitatus that up to now have been primarily defined by the Insurrection Act of 1807. Previously the president could call out the army in the United States only in cases of insurrection or conditions where “rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State or Territory by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” Under the new law the president can use the military in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, a terrorist attack or “other condition in which the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to the extent that state officials cannot maintain public order.”

The new law requires the President to notify Congress “as soon as practicable after the determination and every 14 days thereafter during the duration of the exercise of the authority.” However Bush, as he has often done during his presidency, modified this requirement in his signing statement, which declared, “The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the President’s constitutional authority to withhold information the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, the national security, the deliberative processes of the Executive.” In other words, Bush claims that he does not even need to inform Congress that martial law has been declared!

Read the rest here.

We are down to the last two weeks before the bill that will give Dieticians a monopoly in the arena of nutrition is voted on. We need you (and everyone you know) to get involved. It’s pitchfork time!

Below are links that will automatically be directed to your Representative based on your address. Please take a moment and get involved in the process of protecting your right to access nutritional advice from other qualified individuals that may not happen to be Dieticians. If the Dieticians win, only an RD or an M.D. will be able to give advice. Think of all the people that will be affected! All of our personal freedoms are at risk. Please take a moment and click on the below links and contact your representative. It takes only a few minutes. Thanks. Terri Beim, N.D.

Texas Complementary and Alternative Medical Association

texascam@earthlink.net

Subject: TX Health Freedom – “One Stop Shopping” to contact TX legislature

(Please feel free to send this to interested friends on your e-mail list if you wish.)

Colleagues and Friends of Texas Health Freedom,

Thanks to the unswerving efforts of the clinical nutritionists, we now have “one stop shopping” to express our views on the important bills before the legislature. Simply click on each of the links below and you can send your input directly. The Texas Health Freedom Coalition recommends the following:

Please ask your legislators to vote YES on HB 3056, the Texas Health Freedom bill

Please ask your legislators to vote NO on HB 2419 and SB 1168, the dietitians’ monopoly practice act

Please use the fax form attached to send a fax to the respective committee staff offices to OPPOSE HB 2419 and SB 1168 (the fax numbers are on the forms). Inputs from this many directions create a MASSIVE response to ensure our voices are heard.

Regarding HB 1942, the clincial nutritionists’ title act, please keep in mind the clinical nutritionists are united with us in support of HB 3056 and in opposition to HB 2419 and SB 1168. They have created ALL the communications instruments attached to this message. They have worked diligently to reword their title bill to satisfy their Coalition partners’ concerns (copy of amended bill attached). We know you will vote your own conscience. The Texas Health Freedom Steering Committee, the author of this message, respectfully requests you ask your legislators to vote YES on HB 1942.

Thank you for your support,
Peter McCarthy, ND
Chair, TX Health Freedom Steering Committee
Member Organization, TX Health Freedom Coalition

YOUR IMMEDIATE ACTION IS REQUIRED (WE ARE IN A TWO WEEK COUNTDOWN)

VOTE “NO” TO THE DIETITIAN PRACTICE ACT

NO on HB 2419 NO on SB 1168

_Automatic Legislative Email Action Page_ (http://www.iaacn.org/actions/pnum588.asp) (this will go to your individual senator & representative)

VOTE YES ON: (click below)

_Texas LCN Title Act HB 1942 & HEALTH FREEDOM PRACTICE ACT HB 3056 Automatic Email Action Page_ (http://www.iaacn.org/actions/pnum589.asp) (this will go to your individual senator & representative)

COMMITTEES TO RESPOND TO:

Government Reform Committee (RD HB 2419 & HF 3056 have been referred here)
www.house.state.tx.us/committees/285.htm_
(http://www.house.state.tx.us/committees/285.htm)