November 12, 2007

Neil Bush is in trouble again. These guys just can't keep their hands clean. According to the NY Times, "The inspector general of the Department of Education has said he will examine whether federal money was inappropriately used by three states to buy educational products from a company owned by Neil Bush, the president's brother. John P. Higgins Jr., the inspector general, said he would review the matter after a group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, detailed at least $1 million in spending from the No Child Left Behind program by school districts in Texas, Florida and Nevada to buy products made by Mr. Bush's company, Ignite Learning of Austin, Tex. Mr. Higgins stated his plans in a letter to the group sent last week."

November 15, 2007

Greed of the Masters -- Why the writers are on strike: the bosses say, We can't make you a deal to get paid royalties on your work that is shown online because it is too early too judge how it will all play out. Meanwhile, the big media execs are bragging about the bonanza of online revenue they are getting. They know it's all about content, they just don't want to pay the people who produce it. Same old story. Check out this instructional video on youtube.com. See Barbara Ehrenreich speak her piece on the writers' strike at The Nation.com.

Stunned -- A reporter asked Bush in an indirect manner about speculations that he knew about 9/11 beforehand. He looks like he was hit between the eyes with a greasy ball peen hammer. He is speechless. Check it out at youtube.com.

Corruption in High Places -- During today’s House Oversight Committee hearing on the performance of State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard, Rep. Henry Waxman revealed that Krongard’s brother — former CIA Executive Director A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard — sits on Blackwater USA’s board. Krongard vehemently denied the allegation, calling it an “ugly rumor”. Then he realized he'd better come clean and came back after a break and admitted it was true. See thinkprogress.org for the gory details.

Corrupt Elections USA -- Rank and file Americans, not the political or media establishments, know their elections aren't reliable. See democraticunderground.com.

Killer Dick -- On Cheney's 2003 trip to Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township, Pa., he killed 70 pheasants and an undisclosed number of ducks (his hunting party killed 417 pheasants). On his recent hunting trip to Clove Valley, N.Y., no one's talking. Read more on Cheney's ugly passion for shooting tame birds at alternet.org.

Bush's Criminal Culpability -- Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, who served on the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon, writes for Truthout, "Though it failed to send his nomination the way of Robert Bork, attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey's evasiveness on the definition of torture has done something historic. It has made it unmistakably clear to mainstream observers that the president may be criminally liable for violating anti-torture laws... The War Crimes Act of 1996 makes cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees a violation of the Geneva Conventions and a federal crime. In addition, a 1994 law, 18 USC Section 2340 (a), makes it a federal crime to engage in torture outside the US, and it also applies to those who conspire with (or aid and abet or order) torture outside the US. Both statutes apply to any US national, including the president, the vice president and other top officials, as well as subordinates, such as CIA officers or other US personnel. If the president ordered, directed or authorized waterboarding or other forms of torture or mistreatment, he may have violated these laws. They carry the death penalty in cases where the victim dies. In such cases there is no statute of limitations, so the president could be subject to prosecution for the rest of his life."

Don't Play the Triangulation Game -- Tom Hayden to Barack Obama. Commondreams.org

November 16, 2007

Thoughtcrime Bill Passes House -- The House passed a bill (H.R. 1955) that would outlaw any communication that can be construed as opposed to the government. See timegoesby.net. The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism and Prevention Act of 2007 is an amendment to the Homeland Security Act of 2002. The bill opposes "violent radicalization", which is defined as "process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change." "Homegrown terrorism" is defined as "the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives." Whether something is an "extremist belief system" is a matter of opinion and whether it is "for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change" is a matter of speculation. It's getting back to that Minority Report premise of apprehending people for crimes they have not yet committed. It's getting a long way from the traditional American ideas of freedom of speech and freedom to dissent.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Storybook Hour at the Times -- Politics in the Bush II era is so ugly, so nasty that it's literally sickening, and it's not good for the health to take too much of it in. But then again, it's everywhere, there's really no avoiding it. Today's New York Times: big picture of Bush and Musharraf through a White House window. Amazing picture really, the capture of an intimate moment through a window by Reuters photographer Joshua Roberts. A monumental photograph really, notwithstanding the unpleasantness of the personages pictured. But the caption under the photo is worthy of an AOL Homepage News teaser. It says, "Critics ask if President Bush's personal ties to Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who visited him last fall, led Mr. Bush to misread the general as a democrat, not a dictator."

Why does the New York Times, which is obviously the top newspaper in the United States, cling to a pretension that George Bush cares one whit about "democracy", particularly in this case democracy in Pakistan. The Times implicitly assumes in this caption that he does, that Bush really wants democracy in Pakistan (if not right here in the U.S. where it would have kept him out of the White House if not put to a stop). And we are supposed to believe that it is because of his "personal ties" to Musharraf that he allowed himself to believe that the general who took over Pakistan in a military coup in 1999 is "a democrat". How else could we explain Bush's obvious affection for the general given Bush's great dedication to democracy througout the world (except, of course, the U.S.).

Reading this requires the reader to shift into Fantasy Land to make any sense of it. Ye who pass this threshold, relinquish all common sense! The caption refers the reader to page 20 where the headline blares "Bush's Belief in Personal Ties Blinded Him to Musharraf's Faults, Critics Contend." Ah, dear Bush, the great crusader for Democracy was misled to believe that Musharraf was not in fact a military man who overthrew the government of Pakistan to install a military dictatorship but was really a man in the image of Thomas Jefferson. This is not what critics contend, this is what his friends are saying because it sounds better than the truth.

Even with Bush's obvious limitations in sophistication in regard to world affairs, are we to believe that he somehow was so out of touch that he saw Musharraf to be the opposite of what he so clearly, explicitly was and is? And all this because of "belief in personal ties"? What exactly is "belief in personal ties" anyway? These personal ties that Bush is alleged to have believed in so blindly were certainly formed long after Musharraf had taken over Pakistan in a military coup while Governor Bush was running for president and expressed approval of Musharraf's coup, saying it would "improve stability." Bush's own words are much more realistic than the Times. It would not be a capital crime to prefer stable government in the nuclear enabled Pakistan to a "democracy" which gets so out of control that someone a little crazy gets his hand on the nuclear button. Why can't the Times just report it like it is? Why pretend that poor Bush, the democratic idealist was misled into thinking Musharraf was democratic at heart even though he was a military thug on the surface? Bush may be ignorant and arrogant, but he is not stupid and he is nothing if not a pragmatist. At least give him credit for that, Times, and don't pretend he's an idealistic democratic school boy.

Now that Musharraf has locked down his country in martial law, thrown the supreme court justices and other dissenters in jail, Bush the War President, the Commander in Chief who paraded on the USS Abraham Lincoln in a military uniform to proclaim Mission Accomplished, now tells us that he told his friend in Pakistan, "The United States wants you to have elections as scheduled and take your uniform off." At least he was honest enough to say it was "the United States" that wanted it and didn't claim it was him.

Bottom line: If Bush gave a rat's ass about democracy, he wouldn't have forced Florida to stop counting its votes in December 2000 when his supposed lead had shrunk to 525 votes and he would never have been president. What Bush cares about is power. That's the basis of his affinity with General Musharraf.

November 19, 2007

Beyond the Pentagon Papers -- Daniel Ellsberg told bradblog.com that the story of FBI translator turned whistleblower Sibel Edmonds is "far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers." Sibel Edmonds, according to the ACLU, is "a 32-year-old Turkish-American, [who] was hired as a translator by the FBI shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 because of her knowledge of Middle Eastern languages. She was fired less than a year later in March 2002 for reporting shoddy work and security breaches to her supervisors that could have prevented those attacks." Here's her story as she told it to WGDR Radio in Plainfield, Vermont, and published in the Baltimore Chronicle

Giuliani Buster -- Judith Regan, who is suing Giuliani friend, police chief and convicted criminal Bernie Kerik over an affair he had with her, knows plenty about the Giuliani administration, and might be revealing it. See Frank Rich

Friedman Buys the Farm -- Thomas Friedman may have finally lost his mind. In Sunday's NY Times column, he suggests Obama choose Cheney as a running mate if he gets the nomination. Yes, he's "not serious", but he's serious enough.

Sunday, November 20, 2007

Bringing Down the House of Big Media On Monday, "CBS News writers, producers and editors voted to authorize their labor union to call a strike after working without a contract for two years," writes the New York Times. This is very interesting, considering that the writers strike in Hollywood that began November 5 is still ongoing.

For the past few weeks the networks have been running reruns because the writers are on strike. The big media execs who make tens of millions a year if not more, are bragging about how much money they are making on the Internet, how they'll be richer than ever, than ever dreamed of, but they are telling the writers they can't make them a deal for payment for their content that is used on the Internet because it's too early to tell how much money they're really going to make.

So from November 5 until now, whenever you turned on the Daily Show, you would see something about a day's events that took place some time within the last few months, and it may have been a particularly good show, but it no longer has topicality, the relevance it thrives on. This has got to hurt the network and its owners. But they are holding out. We said no pay for the Internet and we mean it. You can't pressure us. We're not going to give in. With some shows it doesn't matter, but with the Daily Show, which is one of the best, it virtually destroys the show, cuts the interest level in half or so.

Corporate Media Barons are not used to being told what to do. They've controlled the FCC and had it bowing down in reverence to them since the Reagan days in an accelerating downward trajectory. They rarely ask for anything they don't get from the FCC. The better they support the general corporate bloodmoney agenda, the better breaks they get from George Bush's government. They virtually create reality, as in the 9/11 movie that Disney/ABC put on that was a cartoon version of events with a heavy rightward spin. Who cares about reality? They control reality. To a point. Maybe they are reaching that point, the limits of their power, at least with regard to this consituency of "content providers" for their giant moneychurning machines. Yes it's all about content, they jabber, showing off their mastry of current technical jargon. They just don't want to have to pay for the content. Why should they? Writers are a dime a dozen. Everyone wants to be a writer, they reason, you give a guy a job as a writer, he gets all the glory, what does he need to be paid for. These guys are lucky not to be holed up in some dark garret somewhere and they know it. Now suddenly they got no content. Now what.

Now before they get this mess cleaned up the CBS news writers are going on strike. What is that going to do? It's one thing for TVWorld or the Discovery Channel to run re-runs, but CBS News can't run reruns. This is serious. It's more fun than the SuperBowl. It's the titan versus the fleas, and I'm betting on the fleas right now.

Times Asleep at the Wheel -- Former Bush mouthpiece came out with a book confessing the Bush administration's crimes in regard to Valerie Plame, etc., a bombshell, a huge scoop. Where's the story in the Times? Not a word, apparently. See a good summary of the issue at The Ostroy Report.

November 21, 2007

Wall Street Benevolence -- I often feel I need to preface my criticisms of the New York Times with a statement that the Times is arguably the most important paper in the country, in the world, one of the best, in a sense the definitive newspaper of today's world. The epitome of a certain type of publication. It definitely reflects a point of view, it is not "neutral" anymore than anyone else. And putting aside all the yabber about "liberal media" -- which to the extent that it is true is irrelevant -- it would be hard to say that the view it represents is not an establishment view. And it happens that much of the establishment that the New York Times effortfully protects and represents is what I think needs to be taken down.

Let us again, as is always necessary in this era of the KGB-style government of George W. Bush, proclaim at the outset that I do not and nor have I ever advocated violent revolution. Ha! What is required is far beyond that, for more challenging than mere violence, which is a fit of rage against situations but rarely effects meaningful change. Who wins a violent revolution? The guy with the biggest weapons, and you know who that is. No, nothing so easy, or retrogressive.

The depth to which humankind needs urgently to change is beyond the level of conscious thought that is reflected in the language of the New York Times. The presumptions of a culture are difficult to perceive from within the culture. We now stand at a broad precipice in the evolution of humankind when consciousness must change drastically if we want to give human civilization a chance to survive. We are in a transition from one cultural world view to another. To have a chance of survival, that is to be able to deal effectively with the problems human beings have brought upon the world, our consciousness must expand to accommodate the new realities we have created for ourselves, mostly inadvertently.

We must jump from one fishbowl that constitutes our traditional world view to another, hopefully to a more expansive view, a larger one that accommodates the old view but is much larger, as Einsteinian and Quantum physics accommodate and contain Newtonian physics even as they negate it on higher levels.

To draw this back to the specific point at hand: for me to point out what I allege are flaws in the New York Times does not necessarily imply an attempt to deceive. The messages come framed in a world view with its own set of assumptions, many of which badly need to be examined at this point. So forgive me if I get nitpicky about dissecting the logic and illogic of the Times at times. It is to illustrate a point. Perhaps it is possible to reason from the specific to the general in terms of what the Times represents.

So here I am back to my point, looking at the New York Times. There's a story on page one of the Metro section November 20 that is headlined "Surge in Wages on Wall Street In First Quarter Helps Borough". Okay. Wages on Wall Street. "Wages" refers to working people, I guess, so I'm thinking of waiters, office workers, messengers, editors and construction workers, you name it ... working people in the Wall Street district, the American working and middle classes. And we're talking about something that "Helps Borough", so I'm thinking it's a story of good economic news for the working man, who has been falling behind for 30 or 40 years while the higher economic ranks are soaring in their accumulation of wealth. Okay. I was wrong. I wasn't even close. My fault. I had no right to draw those conclusions. I can't say I was misled. I just misread it. Wrong. My fault.

As I read farther I find out how wrong. It says, "According to new federal data released yesterday, the average weekly pretax pay for people who worked at investment banks and brokerage houses in Manhattan was $16,918 in the first three months of this year. That was an increase of almost 25 percent from $13,594 in the first quarter of 2006. The bounty on Wall Street helped pull up the average weekly wage for all workers in Manhattan by 16.7 percent to $2,821, which was the highest of any large county in the country, and more than triple the average salary in any other borough of the city. The data, compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, defined a large county as having at least 75,000 workers; there were 328 large counties nationwide. Nationally, weekly wages for the first quarter of 2007 rose 5.1 percent compared with those of the first quarter of 2006."

Looking more closely at this section it brings a couple of things to mind that deserve to be pointed out. First, we're talking about not the rank and file of middle America as I had thought when I saw the word "wages", we're talking about brokers, investment whizzes who make more in a week than a large swath of the country makes in a year. The "masters of the world", as that set viewed itself in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities . It is these already rich guys who are getting richer, not the man on the street. Okay, that's clear at the outset, but it goes on to say that this gain for the investors "helped" the borough, so how did it do that?

It tells us: "The bounty on Wall Street helped pull up the average weekly wage for all workers in Manhattan by 16.7 percent to $2,821, which was the highest of any large county in the country." Now we all know that words can make numbers lie, but does this not more or less subliminally sound like it is saying that those Wall Street whizzes helped all of Manhattan, that they in fact helped pull up the average weekly wage for all workers. As in "a rising tide raises all boats." Wow. So maybe those Wall Street guys are really not the greedy sharks they have been portrayed to be. How nice of them to help pull up the average weekly wage for all workers!

It may sound like that, but that is not what it's saying. The only thing the raise in pay of the investors is helping, besides the investors themselves and their investments, is to raise an average, a number that results from throwing together all the wages and dividing by the number of the entries. It's a number that appears in a Federal Report. It does absolutely nothing to anyone's wages in the borough, except those already-rich Wall Street investors whose wages are raising.

Just to be clear about it.

Thanksgiving Day, November 22, 2007

11/22 Anniversary -- November 22 was the day John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas in 1963. It seems to be something that should be remembered on this day of turkey gorging.

Out Foul Pestilence! Joseph L. Galloway, writing for McClatchy Newspapers comments on Scott McClellan's confession that he lied to the American people about the Plame incident under the direction of Bush, Cheney, Card, Rove and Libby and goes on to enumerate the low crimes of the Bush administration in his commentary: Good riddance to them all.

Fight Further Media Consolidation -- See the Stop The FCC Action Page and the Facebook Action Page

Happy Thanksgiving -- William Burroughs' Thanksgiving Prayer: youtube.com.

11/22 Anniversary -- November 22 was the day John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas in 1963. It seems to be something that should be remembered on this day of turkey gorging.

Iraq General: Bring Them Home -- "Retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top commander in Iraq shortly after the fall of Baghdad, said this week he supports Democratic legislation that calls for most troops to come home within a year," says the New York Times

The Depravity of the Day -- Richard Powers on McClellan's confession and Thomas Friedman's touting of Cheney as a leader of great strength. Check out Powers' partial listing of Cheney acts of hideousness.

Dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden -- A trip through the Creation Museum. John Scalzi

The New Holocaust -- "Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's flirtation with those who deny the reality of the Nazi genocide has rightly been met with disgust. But another holocaust denial is taking place with little notice: the holocaust in Iraq. The average American believes that 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the US invasion in March 2003. The most commonly cited figure in the media is 70,000. But the actual number of people who have been killed is most likely more than one million." alternet.org.

November 23, 2007

Krongards, 9/11 and Blackwater -- A big tear in the fabric revealed a glimpse of the underground government last week. According to Larry Chin in onlinejournal.com, "New bombshell testimony before Congress has revealed that Alvin B. 'Buzzy' Krongard, the former CIA executive director connected to 9/11 insider trading, is a consultant and advisory board member of Blackwater USA, the New World Order's leading intelligence-related corporate mercenary death squad now under investigation for war crimes, murder, arms smuggling, and fraud in Iraq. Buzzy Krongard's Blackwater role was confirmed by Buzzy's brother, Howard Cookie Krongard, who (not ironically) is the Bush/Cheney administration's State Department's inspector general, and the official under fire for stonewalling and quashing attempted probes of Blackwater's operations."

White House Crime File -- Robert Parry created a good summary of the conspiracy of five top White House officials to cover up their involvement in the crime of revealing the identity of a covert CIA agent. See consortiumnews.com.

High Crime Pays -- Fox News pundit John Gibson said the White House "deserves a medal" for outing Valerie Plame because "this was about an anti-Bush cabal at the CIA” that needed to be "rooted out." thinkprogress.org

Call for Investigation -- Rep. Bill Pascrell calls for hearings into the McLellan disclosure. Capital Games

MEDIA ROULETTE

November 24, 2007

Saturday Night on Kennedy Death Weekend -- Saturday night, the History Channel is playing a show called "Kennedys: The Curse of Power". One of the people interviewed, one of those in the generation just a little younger than JFK, said of the assassination, "It was hard to get your mind around..." In one moment he was gone, his presence was gone, the New Frontier was over. It seems clear half a century later that for practically the whole generation of his more-or-less contemporaries that was true. They really couldn't get their minds around it. For those who were most affected by the Kennedy presidency, it was something they could barely comprehend in its implications, and that seems to be at the heart of the acceptance of the official story of his death, limited as that acceptance is among the population.

We have little trouble recognizing that a conspiracy was behind the death of Abraham Lincoln, not just a lone nut. It was so long ago, who could be threatened by one explanation over another? But the crime of murder of JFK in 1963 affected the ruling order of the country and the unmasking of the truth could still shake the establishment and affect people who are still living. No one was ever convicted of that murder. That explains the great efforts to protect the acceptance of the official story.

History will no doubt reconstruct the murder scenario more or less accurately in its main contours, though many mysteries will always remain. The weight that holds up the establishment story will fall away as Kennedy's contemporaries and those who have a vested interest in upholding the establishment story die away.

The 9/11 story is very similar. No one has been convicted of anything, no one held responsible for dropping the ball leading to a massive security breach on multiple levels. And most people still cannot "get their minds around" what happened. Most seem to prefer a simple explanation to adopting an attitude of wanting to know the answers to contradictions in the story that remain unresolved.

The truth of that story that lies beyond the official explanation will probably become established in time through the natural progression of historic inquiry. A tremendous amount is already known, though most of the investigation to both crimes has been conducted independently by private researchers.

When we talk about how the major media, including the New York Times and virtually all established media, virtually unanimous in its support of the Warren Commission, we are talking about an official version, but an establishment version, not a government version. The government's last report concluded that the assassination was a mob hit. But this report, narrated by Peter Jennings represents the establishment view, not the provisionary government that we see on the public stage, but the permanent government, the power elite that owns and runs the country. And that echelon wants very much to perpetuate a world view that is supportive to the corporate rule of the USA, and the beyond-Warren version of that killing is not supportive of that world view.

After the show that described all the violent deaths in the Kennedy family history as a result of a curse, the History Channel showed a program called The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy, which attempted to establish that the majority belief in a conspiracy behind the murder of JFK is based on a psychological need for more meaning to the act than the meaninglessness of a lone nut shooting a president to become famous. It's actually remarkably similar to the argument I put forth above, but used to support the opposite conclusion.

The film uses the technique of proof by computer animation. It's impressive animation and quite well done, panning all over the place with a dexterity that was never possible in animation before the introduction of computers to the process. In our generation we are still dazzled by computer technology, still prone to being almost hypnotized by it.

Only a few years ago, businesses that were innovative with the Internet were called "Internet businesses." Now, of course, all businesses are Internet businesses, so the phrase is almost nonsense. A few years before the Internet revolution, anything that was supposedly done "by computer" was widely assumed to be reliable. Computers were touted as perfect. Now the general population has enough experience with computers to know that not only can mistakes very definitely occur with computers, "computer error" is one of the most frequently encountered excuses for why things go wrong in business. The computer animation reconstruction of the assassination is subject to the principle applicable to any computer operation: garbage in garbage out. The pictures made of the assassination are impressive. They certainly make it look crystal clear. The cartoons, however, don't in themselves prove anything.

There is a tremendous amount of evidence available to contradict the proposition of the film, but one has to seek it out and read about it. The program spent a lot of time recreating the mood of the time and telling a version of the story from a psychological point of view. The evidence supposedly establishing the single bullet theory, without which the whole Warren Report collapses, is presented in about five minutes of animation and then dismissed for more dramatic elements. The program continues to follow the story from the standpoint of the psychology of the people who believe in a conspiracy, and from the standpoint of Oswald's supposed psychological makeup. Like the Warren Report itself, it focuses primarily on Oswald and paints a picture of him as a budding assassin, but leaves out important parts of his biography, such as his work in Japan in the military and his training in the Russian language before his later trip to the USSR allegedly as a defector. There's a massive volume of information available on these matters, it's not a case I want to argue here.

One of the better, more comprehensive reference books on the subject is Jim Marrs' Crossfire, which is available at Amazon.com. It was one of the primary reference books used by Oliver Stone in his creation of the film JFK. It's one of many many good references for those interested, but it's a good starting point and a good single volume for those who don't want to commit to more research.

November 27, 2007

Dead Time -- Bernard Weiner on McClellan's not-revelation about the Bush-Cheney complicity in the crime of outing undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame. So we all know it, we already knew it. What now? "We're in the midst of the two parties trying to run out the clock, for their own ends. The Republicans support CheneyBush's staying-the-course plan in Iraq and aim to run out the clock until November 2008 so that it will be the next President (even better if that person is a Democrat) who will be blamed for 'losing' the war. The Democrats, eager to pin 'Bush's War' disaster on the Republicans, are playing run-out-the-clock by not forcing an end to the catastrophe... The upshot of both sides playing their long-range political chess-game is that major, complex problems, foreign and domestic, are not being properly addressed. In terms of the Iraq war, it also means that hundreds or maybe even tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops will die or come back home physically or mentally maimed, and that hundreds of thousands of more innocent Iraqis may well be slaughtered or wounded as well."

Reckoning -- Paul Craig Roberts, writing on onlinejournal.com, says, "Pat Buchanan is too patriotic to come right out and say it, but the message of his new book, Day of Reckoning, is that America as we have known her is finished. Moreover, Naomi Wolf agrees with him. These two writers of different political persuasions arrive at America's demise from different directions."

Adolescent Adults -- Joe Conason, with the Bush administration, "the grownups never showed up." Truthdig.com

Now You're Talking -- "Presidential hopeful Delaware Sen. Joe Biden stated unequivocally that he will move to impeach President Bush if he bombs Iran without first gaining congressional approval." Seacoast Online

November 28, 2007

Real Live Horror -- Stephen King interviewed by Time magazine says Time's Person of the Year should be Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. Time

Decay of the Empire -- "The American working class, once the most prosperous on Earth, has been politically disempowered, impoverished and abandoned. Manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas. State and federal assistance programs have been slashed. The corporations, those that orchestrated the flight of jobs and the abolishment of workers' rights, control every federal agency in Washington, including the Department of Labor. They have dismantled the regulations that had made the country's managed capitalism a success for ordinary men and women. The Democratic and Republican Parties now take corporate money and do the bidding of corporate interests." Philadelphia Inquirer

You're With Us or Agin' Us -- The story on Don Siegelman, the governor of Alabama that friends of Rove managed to get into jail under fishy circumstances. The Raw Story

-- David Cogswell

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