Bush setting America up for war on Iran

Here we go again. From Common Dreams

Bush Setting America Up for War on Iran
by Philip Sherwell in New York and Tim Shipman in Washington
Sunday Telegraph/UK
September 16, 2007

Senior American intelligence and defense officials believe that President George W Bush and his inner circle are taking steps to place America on the path to war with Iran, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

Pentagon planners have developed a list of up to 2,000 bombing targets in Iran, amid growing fears among serving officers that diplomatic efforts to slow Iran's nuclear weapons program are doomed to fail.

Pentagon and CIA officers say they believe that the White House has begun a carefully calibrated program of escalation that could lead to a military showdown with Iran.

Now it has emerged that Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, who has been pushing for a diplomatic solution, is prepared to settle her differences with Vice-President Dick Cheney and sanction military action.

In a chilling scenario of how war might come, a senior intelligence officer warned that public denunciation of Iranian meddling in Iraq - arming and training militants - would lead to cross border raids on Iranian training camps and bomb factories.

A prime target would be the Fajr base run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Force in southern Iran, where Western intelligence agencies say armor-piercing projectiles used against British and US troops are manufactured.

Under the theory - which is gaining credence in Washington security circles - US action would provoke a major Iranian response, perhaps in the form of moves to cut off Gulf oil supplies, providing a trigger for air strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities and even its armed forces.

Senior officials believe Mr Bush's inner circle has decided he does not want to leave office without first ensuring that Iran is not capable of developing a nuclear weapon.

The intelligence source said: "No one outside that tight circle knows what is going to happen." But he said that within the CIA "many if not most officials believe that diplomacy is failing" and that "top Pentagon brass believes the same".

He said: "A strike will probably follow a gradual escalation. Over the next few weeks and months the US will build tensions and evidence around Iranian activities in Iraq."

Previously, accusations that Mr Bush was set on war with Iran have come almost entirely from his critics.

Many senior operatives within the CIA are highly critical of Mr Bush's handling of the Iraq war, though they themselves are considered ineffective and unreliable by hardliners close to Mr Cheney.

The vice president is said to advocate the use of bunker-busting tactical nuclear weapons against Iran's nuclear sites. His allies dispute this, but Mr Cheney is understood to be lobbying for air strikes if sites can be identified where Revolutionary Guard units are training Shia militias.

Recent developments over Iraq appear to fit with the pattern of escalation predicted by Pentagon officials.

Gen David Petraeus, Mr Bush's senior Iraq commander, denounced the Iranian "proxy war" in Iraq last week as he built support in Washington for the US military surge in Baghdad.

The US also announced the creation of a new base near the Iraqi border town of Badra, the first of what could be several locations to tackle the smuggling of weapons from Iran.

A State Department source familiar with White House discussions said that Miss Rice, under pressure from senior counter-proliferation officials to acknowledge that military action may be necessary, is now working with Mr Cheney to find a way to reconcile their positions and present a united front to the President.

The source said: "When you go down there and see the body language, you can see that Cheney is still The Man. Condi pushed for diplomacy but she is no dove. If it becomes necessary she will be on board.

"Both of them are very close to the president, and where they differ they are working together to find a way to present a position they can both live with."

The official contrasted the efforts of the secretary of state to work with the vice-president with the "open warfare between Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld before the Iraq war".

Miss Rice's bottom line is that if the administration is to go to war again it must build the case over a period of months and win sufficient support on Capitol Hill.

The Sunday Telegraph has been told that Mr Bush has privately promised her that he would consult "meaningfully" with Congressional leaders of both parties before any military action against Iran on the understanding that Miss Rice would resign if this did not happen.

The intelligence officer said that the US military has "two major contingency plans" for air strikes on Iran.

"One is to bomb only the nuclear facilities. The second option is for a much bigger strike that would - over two or three days - hit all of the significant military sites as well. This plan involves more than 2,000 targets."

Democrats’ responsibility for Bush radicalism

From Common Dreams:

Democrats’ Responsibility for Bush Radicalism
by Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com
August 4, 2007

It is staggering, and truly disgusting, that even in August, 2007 — almost six years removed from the 9/11 attacks and with the Bush presidency cemented as one of the weakest and most despised in American history — that George W. Bush can “demand” that the Congress jump and re-write legislation at his will, vesting in him still greater surveillance power, by warning them, based solely on his say-so, that if they fail to comply with his demands, the next Terrorist attack will be their fault. And they jump and scamper and comply (Meteor Blades has the list of the 16 Senate Democrats voting in favor; the House will soon follow).

I just finished a discussion panel with ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero which was originally planned to examine his new (superb) book about the work his organization has done for years in battling the endless expansion of executive power and presidential lawbreaking. But the only issue anyone in the room really wanted to discuss — including us — was the outrage unfolding on Capitol Hill. And the anger was almost universally directed where it belongs: on Congressional Democrats, who increasingly bear more and more responsibility for the assaults on our constitutional liberties and unparalleled abuses of government power — many (probably most) of which, it should always be emphasized, remain concealed rather than disclosed.

Examine virtually every Bush scandal and it increasingly bears the mark not merely of Democratic capitulation, but Democratic participation. In August of 2006, the Supreme Court finally asserted the first real limit on Bush’s radical executive power theories in Hamdan, only for Congress, months later, to completely eviscerate those minimal limits — and then go far beyond — by enacting the grotesque Military Commissions Act with the support of substantial numbers of Democrats. What began as a covert and illegal Bush interrogation and detention program became the officially sanctioned, bipartisan policy of the United States.

Grave dangers are posed to our basic constitutional safeguards by the replacement of Sandra Day O’Connor with Sam Alito, whose elevation to the Supreme Court Congressional Democrats chose to permit. Vast abuses and criminality in surveillance remain undisclosed, uninvestigated and unimpeded because Congressional Democrats have stood meekly by while the administration refuses to disclose what it has been doing in how it spies on us. And we remain in Iraq, in direct defiance of the will of the vast majority of the country, because the Democratic Beltway establishment lacks both the courage and the desire to compel an end to that war.

And now Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, with revealing symbolism, cancel their scheduled appearances this morning at Yearly Kos because George Bush ordered them to remain in Washington in order to re-write and expand FISA — a law which he has repeatedly refused to allow to be revised for years and which he has openly and proudly violated. Congressional Democrats know virtually nothing about how the Bush administration has been eavesdropping on our conversations because the administration refused to tell them and they passively accepted this state of affairs.

The intense rush to amend this legislation means that most of them have no idea what they are actually enacting — even less of an idea than they typically have. But what they know is that George Bush and Fox News and the Beltway establishment have told them that they would be irresponsible and weak and unserious if they failed to comply with George Bush’s instructions, and hence, they comply. In the American political landscape, there have been profound changes in public opinion since September of 2001. But in the Beltway, among our political and media establishment, virtually nothing has changed.

I don’t have time this morning to dissect the various excesses and dangers of the new FISA amendments, though Marty Lederman and Steve Benen both do a typically thorough job in that regard. Suffice to say, craven fear, as usual, is the author of this debacle.

There are many mythologies about what are the defining beliefs and motivations of bloggers and their readers and the attendees at Yearly Kos. One of the principal myths is that it is all driven by a familiar and easily defined ideological agenda and/or a partisan attachment to the Democratic Party. That is all false.

The common, defining political principle here — what resonates far more powerfully than any other idea — is a fervent and passionate belief in our country’s constitutional framework, the core liberties it secures, and the checks and balances it offers as a safeguard against tyrannical power. Those who fail to defend that framework, or worse, those who are passively or actively complicit in its further erosion, are all equally culpable. With each day that passes, the radicalism and extremism originally spawned in secret by the Bush presidency becomes less and less his fault and more and more the fault of those who — having discovered what they have been doing and having been given the power to stop it — instead acquiesce to it and, worse, enable and endorse it.

Keith Olbermann on Bush's cowardly and shameful scapegoating of Hillary Clinton

This guy has balls... reminds me of that movie "Good Night, and Good Luck", of Edward R. Murrow standing up to Joseph McCarthy. We have so few people of character in our national debate these days (probably mainly due to corporate ownership of the media), it's refreshing to see someone. From YouTube:

Democrats halt Senate debate on Iraq war

The World Socialist Web Site, one of the only publications I usually agree with these days, because it's one of the only ones that refuses to sell out its principles, has this article condemning the Democratic Party for its "unspoken collaboration with Bush" in continuing the American occupation of Iraq.

Democrats halt Senate debate on Iraq war
By Patrick Martin
World Socialist Web Site
20 July 2007

Senate Democrats abandoned an effort to impose restrictions on the Bush administration’s conduct of the war in Iraq after losing a procedural vote Wednesday to halt a Republican filibuster. After 24 hours of desultory debate on Iraq war policy, the Democratic leadership caved in to the White House, effectively conceding that there will be no change in US policy in Iraq for as long as Bush has congressional Republican support to continue the present course.

Just before noon the Senate fell well short of the 60 votes required to force a vote on the plan offered by Democrats Carl Levin of Michigan and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, which would give the Bush administration 120 days to begin withdrawing combat troops from Iraq. The amendment to the defense authorization bill would have set an April 2008 deadline for withdrawal of all combat forces, but allowed tens of thousands of US troops to remain in Iraq indefinitely for the stated purpose of fighting terrorists, training Iraqi troops and protecting US assets.

Only four Republicans joined 48 Democrats and one independent to support the amendment. Majority Leader Harry Reid switched his vote at the last minute in order to preserve his right to seek reconsideration at a later stage, making the final margin 52-47. But minutes after this parliamentary maneuver, Reid announced he was pulling the defense bill from the Senate calendar and would not permit votes on any other amendments related to the Iraq war.

This sudden change of tack—votes on various amendments had been planned, including a measure to require closure of the US concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay—was actually decided upon at a private conclave of Senate Democratic leaders Monday.

According to press reports, the Democrats feared that several more modest war-related measures might pass if they reached the floor for a vote, including a bipartisan measure to adopt the report of the Iraq Study Group as government policy, and an amendment by Republicans Richard Lugar and John Warner requiring Bush to develop operational plans for a draw-down of US troops, while not mandating any actual pullout.

Both amendments would have given Senate Republicans an opportunity to go on record in a vote against Bush administration policy in an effort to appease public antiwar sentiment, while doing nothing in practice to interfere with the ongoing escalation of the war. By blocking their consideration, Reid was essentially saying that the privilege of offering toothless amendments that do not end the war would be reserved for the Democrats, who need the political cover even more than the Republicans.

One prominent Republican, Senator Lugar, spoke sympathetically of Reid’s difficulties. “He recognizes that Iraq is the major issue that brought Democrats into a majority in both houses,” Lugar said. “That constituency is unsatisfied and restive, and therefore politically this becomes the top priority by quite a distance.”

The additional amendments would also have brought to the surface divisions among the Senate Democrats. The Republican filibuster has obscured those divisions. It is not even certain that the Levin-Reed amendment would have passed if it had come up for a vote, as several Democrats who voted to end the filibuster were not committed to vote for the amendment itself.

One of the Democratic candidates elected in November 2006, Senator Jon Tester of Montana, emphasized that he believed the Senate should neither order removal of all troops nor set policy for the conduct of military operations. He backed a vote on the Levin-Reed amendment more as a symbolic gesture of the need for a change in policy. “It still gives the commander-in-chief the flexibility he needs as commander-in-chief,” Tester said.

The Montana senator added, “[T]here was a significant number of troops in the Middle East before we started this thing; there’s going to be some troops in the Middle East; there’s US interests involved and that’s the nature of the beast.” Indicating his support for an open-ended US presence in Iraq, he said, “We’ve been there for four years and I don’t think you can anticipate that everybody is going to be out. I don’t think that’s going to be the case. There’ll be some left, as needed.”

The decision to end further consideration of war-related legislation, at least until mid-September, means that scores if not hundreds more American soldiers and thousands more innocent Iraqi civilians will be slaughtered. But Reid was the picture of complacency. “You cannot fight against the future,” he told his Republican counterparts. “Time is on our side.”

Assistant Majority Leader Richard Durbin declared during the debate, “This war was born in deception. At the highest levels of our government, it has been waged with incompetence and arrogance.” These are, however, empty words, given that the Democrats have flatly rejected any effort to remove Bush and Cheney from office.

In a fundamental sense, the entire framework of the Senate debate was a fraud, since Reid, Durbin & Co. have already pushed through the emergency funding bill required by the Bush administration to finance the war through September 30. Pentagon officials had warned that they would be compelled to halt military operations in Iraq for lack of funding, but the House and Senate buckled and passed the appropriations bill with top-heavy bipartisan majorities at the end of May.

The congressional Democrats have thus foresworn both the constitutional method for ending the US occupation of Iraq—using Congress’s “power of the purse” to force a withdrawal of US forces—and the constitutional method for removing those responsible for a criminal and aggressive war, impeachment.

Instead, they have devoted their efforts to a public relations campaign aimed at portraying themselves as opponents of the war while permitting Bush and Cheney to continue it unhindered. This has included such measures as non-binding resolutions, resolutions that will not be brought to a vote (in the Senate), and resolutions that cannot survive a presidential veto (in the House), combined with passage of the bill providing $100 billion to continue military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In this duplicitous attempt to delude the vast majority of Democratic voters who oppose the war, the congressional Democrats have received political assistance from liberal pressure groups like MoveOn.org and United for Peace and Justice, and publications like the Nation, which have portrayed the legislative play-acting as though it were a titanic battle for the soul of the republic.

Tom Matzzie of MoveOn.org hailed Reid’s decision to pull the defense authorization bill from the Senate calendar, declaring, “I think Senator Reid took an important step toward confronting Republican obstructionism and ending the war.” Matzzie told the Washington Post that his organization would focus on the 21 Senate Republicans facing reelection next year, with the goal of “forcing the entire Republican Party to look over the side of the cliff” in contemplating the electoral consequences of continued support for the war. “Ultimately, we end the war by creating a toxic political environment for war supporters like the Republicans in the Senate,” he said.

A similar group, Progressive Democrats of America, admitted in an email to supporters Tuesday, “The Levin-Reed Amendment does not end the occupation and it leaves too many troops and all military contractors behind in Iraq.” Nonetheless, it said that passage of the amendment would be “a good first step” and offered the prospect of further action in the fall when senators would be urged to “step forward to offer an amendment to bring the troops home by the holidays.”

Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, an umbrella for the pro-Democratic Party groups critical of the war—including MoveOn.org, Center for American Progress, the Service Employees International Union, Win Without War, and the Campaign for America’s Future—said it would encourage lobbying to “keep the heat on” the Republican senators who claimed to oppose the White House on Iraq policy.

It was left to the Nation magazine to make a bald admission that the antiwar pretense of the Senate Democrats was wearing thin. In a column hailing the beginning of the round-the-clock debate on war policy as a vigorous new effort by the Democratic leadership, the magazine observed that because of the continuation of the war, more than eight months after the Democratic victory in November 2006, there was the danger that “more and more Americans came to see Reid and the Democrats as, at best, ineffective; and, at worst, in unspoken collaboration with Bush.”

This is, in truth, the real state of affairs in official Washington. None of the crimes perpetrated by the Bush administration, whether in Iraq or at home, could have been carried out without that “unspoken”—and frequently overt—collaboration by the Democratic Party.

Capitalism vs. democracy: Rights of money versus rights of living persons

This article from David Korten, the author of "When Corporations Rule the World", argues that our market-based system of government in America -- "one dollar, one vote" -- is not democracy -- "one person, one vote". I have come to the same conclusion myself, that capitalism and democracy are fundamentally opposed to each other. In one, each individual strives to maximize his or her inequality (richness in power in comparison to others); in the other, the system is defined by equality for all. As long as there is unequal property ownership, there will be unequal power, and the more unequal the distribution of power, the less democratic society is. I would say that capitalism -- completely market-driven, with policy auctioned off to the highest bidder -- is a better description of our system of government. Just look at how our candidates for government have to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to buy ads on TV, when the airwaves are actually owned by the public and could easily be used for public purposes. There could easily be a law against the private funding of political campaign ads and instead a certain amount of free advertising time given to each candidate.

Rights of money versus rights of living persons
David C. Korten
Feasta Review, number 1

Property rights should be limited by law to prevent those who have more than enough using them to deny others their right to the means of making a livelihood. Moreover, companies should be banned from political activities of any kind because political rights reside only in real people.

Proponents of market liberalism claim the free market is the essential foundation of political democracy -- a guarantor of the rights of people against the abuse of state power. They neglect, however, the important ways in which the unfettered market tends to function as a profoundly undemocratic institution.

Political democracy vests rights in the living person, one person, one vote. By contrast, the market recognises only money, not people -- one dollar, one vote. It gives no voice to the penniless, and when not balanced by constraining political forces can become an instrument of oppression by which the wealthy monopolise society's resources, leaving the less fortunate without land, jobs, technology or other means of livelihood. Only when wealth is equally distributed can the market be considered democratic in any meaningful sense.

Global markets are now dominated by global mega-corporations -- among the most undemocratic and unaccountable of human institutions. By its nature the corporation creates a legal concentration of power while shielding those who wield that power from accountability for the consequences of its use. Many mega-corporations command more economic power than do the majority of states and dominate the political processes of nearly all states. Their growing unaccountable power poses a serious threat to the basic economic and political rights of people everywhere.

The time has come to re-examine some of our most basic assumptions about the nature of democracy, human rights, and the institution of the corporation. The survival of our political freedoms depends on recognising that economic rights are an essential foundation of political democracy. Consider for example two of the most fundamental of all human rights -- the right to a means of living -- literally the right to live -- and the right to participate in making the decisions that affect our lives.

The Right of Access to a Means of Living.

The earth's life-sustaining resources are a common heritage of all life. All people are born with an inalienable right to a sufficient share of these resources to create a secure and fulfilling life for themselves and their families. They have a corresponding responsibility to share and steward these resources to the benefit of all persons and other living things.

Since the most basic requirements of living depend on the products of the earth, there is a fundamental -- though often neglected -- connection between livelihood rights and property rights. English philosopher John Locke set forth a moral justification for property rights in The Second Treatise of Government published in 1689. Locke argued that where unused land is abundant, a man has a right to appropriate for his private and exclusive use the land which he tills to produce for his basic subsistence needs. It is through the application of his labour to make the land produce that he acquires this private right. Locke stressed that given the condition of abundance, such appropriation in no way deprived others of similar opportunity. Locke was also clear that the rightful claim to a property right followed only from the application of one's personal labour. Furthermore, he said, this claim legitimately extended only to such property as required to meet one's own material needs -- suggesting that a property right is virtually synonymous with a livelihood right,

Locke, however, went beyond this relatively unassailable moral argument to seek justification for actions of those who accumulate property rights far beyond their personal needs. Presuming that property rights are most likely to be accumulated by clever and industrious persons who seek to realise their full productive potential, Locke argued that the result of this accumulation would be to maximise the wealth of society and thereby the well-being of all. It is essentially the same argument that economists make to this day in defence of inequality based on the assumption that the surpluses created through investments of the wealthy in a growing economy will be widely distributed through society in the form of high-paying jobs and well-funded public services.

It is noteworthy that the moral defence of inequality imbedded in Locke's thesis and the work of most modern economists rests on two inadequately examined assumptions: 1) natural wealth is abundant relative to need; and 2) the benefits of an overall increase in economic activity are widely shared even when wealth is distributed unequally. Unfortunately, for several billion people who find their livelihoods increasingly at risk, neither premise is valid in our present world. To the contrary, the poor are being excluded from access to land, technology is eliminating jobs faster than it is creating new ones, and public services are being systematically dismantled -- all to increase the riches of those whose wealth already exceeds any conceivable need. In short, property rights are being used routinely to justify the exclusion of those without property from access to a decent means of living.

As suggested by Locke's argument, the rightful purpose of a property right is to protect a person's right of access to a means of livelihood or to secure for the individual a just reward for entrepreneurial initiatives that create a better life for all. A property right loses its legitimacy when its exercise by those who have more than they need denies others of their rightful means of livelihood or otherwise diminishes their opportunities for a full and meaningful life. The livelihood rights of the many come before the property rights of the few. Recognition in our laws and public culture of this limitation of property rights is fundamental to the market's socially efficient function.

The Right to Participate in Decisions That Affect One's Life and Community.

Born with reason, conscience, and the capacity for intelligent choice, all people have the inalienable right -- indeed the obligation -- to use these gifts to participate actively in the decisions that affect their lives and communities. The rights of speech and assembly derive from this basic right to participate. The right to participate resides in the person and does not rightfully extend to any corporation.

In the economic realm the exercise of the right of participation extends far beyond choosing among those products the market finds it profitable to offer us. It includes the right to participate in setting standards and priorities for the economic affairs of our communities, the uses to which our local resources will be put, and the conditions under which we will engage in external trade and invite the participation of others in our domestic economies.
There is nothing democratic about an unregulated market that responds exclusively to the needs of the wealthy and subordinates human rights and interests to corporate rights and interests.

This right is under attack by the world's mega-corporations that seek to establish their own right to move across the face of the planet without restriction to extract resources, exploit unorganised and unprotected labour, evade taxes and environmental regulations, and monopolise indigenous knowledge and genetic materials without regard to the human and environmental consequences. Their weapons of choice are international agreements on trade and investment that take precedence over the rules and regulations established by people and their governments to govern local commerce. Negotiated in secret and implemented without full public discussion and democratic assent, these agreements are systematically eroding the democratic rights of people to regulate their own local and national economies, and to set rules for commerce consistent with their own values and judgements regarding their personal and community needs. The interests of money and the fictitious legal persona of the corporation are thus placed ahead of the interests of living persons and their communities -- all in the name of market freedom.

It is useful to recall that Adam Smith, the patron saint of free marketeers, favoured a market comprised exclusively of small buyers and sellers. Smith considered the corporation to be an instrument for monopolising markets and saw no place for such institutions in a properly functioning competitive market economy. By his reckoning the corporation is an anti-market institution.

A corporation comes into being only through the public act of the government that issues the corporate charter. The creation of a corporation is thus a public, not a private, act and its only justification is to serve a public purpose. Whatever privileges or authority the corporation may enjoy are derived from the authority of government, which is itself derived from the will of the people. It therefore follows that the corporation is rightfully subject to the will of the people and to whatever laws people freely chose to establish governing its function.

Nor does a corporation rightfully enjoy any privilege beyond the jurisdiction of the government that issued its charter unless and until the people of another jurisdiction explicitly chose to grant it such privilege. It is the proper function of the corporation to implement the laws that people establish through their governments, not to participate in their creation. Indeed, it is essential to the integrity of democratic governance that corporations be barred from political participation of any kind on the theory that political rights reside only in real people.

The idea that corporations should enjoy the rights of flesh and blood persons -- including the right of free speech -- grew out of a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1886 that designated corporations as legal persons entitled to all the rights and protections afforded by the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. Significantly, the U.S. Constitution makes no reference to corporations. It was a decision without legal or moral foundation made by a corrupted court system.

As citizens it is our right to revise existing legal codes to make clear that human rights belong only to flesh and blood persons. Similarly, it is our right to replace trade and investment agreements that abrogate the most basic political and economic rights of people with international agreements that protect the rights to economic and political choice of all people against infringement by democratically unaccountable institutions -- either state or corporation.

Markets are important institutions and they have an essential place in any democratic society -- functioning within a framework of democratically determined rules and public safeguards. There is nothing democratic, however, about an unregulated market that responds exclusively to the needs of the wealthy and subordinates human rights and interests to corporate rights and interests. In the end only an active and politically engaged citizenry can assure the protection of our human rights from the arbitrary use of power by either states or corporations. Institutional power and legitimacy flow from the will of people, and when any institution usurps our natural rights, it is right of the people to restructure, replace, or eliminate, that institution.

This aticle was first circulated by the People-Centered Development Forum in May 1997.

________________________________________________________

Biographical Sketch

David C. Korten holds MBA and PhD degrees from Stanford Business School and taught for five years at Harvard Business School before joining the Harvard Institute for International development to head a Ford Foundation project to strengthen national family planning programmes. He moved to Southeast Asia in the late 1970s, working first for the Ford Foundation and then as a regional advisor on development management to USAID. Eventually, disillusioned with the official aid system, he spend the last five years of his fifteen in Asia working with NGOs identifying why development was failing.

He came to realise that the deepening poverty, growing inequality, environmental devastation, and social disintegration he was observing in Asia were also being experienced in nearly every country in the world. Moreover, the United States was actively promoting policies that made matters worse. For the world to survive, the United States must change, and he returned to the US in 1992 to help bring that change about. He has since written two highly influential books, When Corporations Rule the World (1995) and The Post Corporate World: Life After Capitalism (1999).

48% of Americans, 68% of Republicans don't believe in evolution

From a Gallup Poll:

"Now thinking about how human beings came to exist on Earth, do you, personally, believe in evolution, or not?"

	Yes	No	Unsure
Americans	49	48	2
Republicans	30	68	2
Democrats	57	40	3
Independents	61	37	2
Church Weekly	24	74	2
Church Monthly	52	45	3
Church Rarely	71	26	3

Gallup's summary:

The majority of Republicans in the United States do not believe the theory of evolution is true and do not believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. This suggests that when three Republican presidential candidates at a May debate stated they did not believe in evolution, they were generally in sync with the bulk of the rank-and-file Republicans whose nomination they are seeking to obtain.

Independents and Democrats are more likely than Republicans to believe in the theory of evolution. But even among non-Republicans there appears to be a significant minority who doubt that evolution adequately explains where humans came from.

The data from several recent Gallup studies suggest that Americans' religious behavior is highly correlated with beliefs about evolution. Those who attend church frequently are much less likely to believe in evolution than are those who seldom or never attend. That Republicans tend to be frequent churchgoers helps explain their doubts about evolution.

The data indicate some seeming confusion on the part of Americans on this issue. About a quarter of Americans say they believe both in evolution's explanation that humans evolved over millions of years and in the creationist explanation that humans were created as is about 10,000 years ago.

The unitary executive theory of American monarchy

According to Alternet, Bush just signed a "presidential directive" giving him "all governmental power" in the case of a "catastrophic emergency" such as a terrorist attack or natural disaster.

Don't We Have a Constitution, Not a King?
By Marjorie Cohn
AlterNet
June 1, 2007

As the nation focused on whether Congress would exercise its constitutional duty to cut funding for the war, Bush quietly issued an unconstitutional bombshell that went virtually unnoticed by the corporate media.

The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive, signed on May 9, 2007, would place all governmental power in the hands of the President and effectively abolish the checks and balances in the Constitution.

If a "catastrophic emergency" -- which could include a terrorist attack or a natural disaster -- occurs, Bush's new directive says: "The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government."

What about the other two co-equal branches of government? The directive throws them a bone by speaking of a "cooperative effort" among the three branches, "coordinated by the President, as a matter of comity with respect to the legislative and judicial branches and with proper respect for the constitutional separation of powers." The Vice-President would help to implement the plans.

"Comity," however, means courtesy, and the President would decide what kind of respect for the other two branches of government would be "proper." This Presidential Directive is a blatant power grab by Bush to institutionalize "the unitary executive."

A seemingly innocuous phrase, the unitary executive theory actually represents a radical, ultra rightwing interpretation of the powers of the presidency. Championed by the conservative Federalist Society, the unitary executive doctrine gathers all power in the hands of the President and insulates him from any oversight by the congressional or judicial branches.

In a November 2000 speech to the Federalist Society, then Judge Samuel Alito said the Constitution "makes the president the head of the executive branch, but it does more than that. The president has not just some executive powers, but the executive power -- the whole thing."

These "unitarians" claim that all federal agencies, even those constitutionally created by Congress, are beholden to the Chief Executive, that is, the President. This means that Bush could disband agencies like the Federal Communications Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Reserve Board, etc., if they weren't to his liking.

Indeed, Bush signed an executive order stating that each federal agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee. Consumer advocates were concerned that this directive was aimed at weakening the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The unitary executive dogma represents audacious presidential overreaching into the constitutional province of the other two branches of government.

This doctrine took shape within the Bush administration shortly after 9/11. On September 25, 2001, former deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo used the words "unitary executive" in a memo he wrote for the White House: "The centralization of authority in the president alone is particularly crucial in matters of national defense, war, and foreign policy, where a unitary executive can evaluate threats, consider policy choices, and mobilize national resources with a speed and energy that is far superior to any other branch." Six weeks later, Bush began using that phrase in his signing statements.

As of December 22, 2006, Bush had used the words "unitary executive" 145 times in his signing statements and executive orders. Yoo, one of the chief architects of Bush's doctrine of unfettered executive power, wrote memoranda advising Bush that because he was commander in chief, he could make war any time he thought there was a threat, and he didn't have to comply with the Geneva Conventions.

In a 2005 debate with Notre Dame professor Doug Cassel, Yoo argued there is no law that could prevent the President from ordering that a young child of a suspect in custody be tortured, even by crushing the child's testicles.

The unitary executive theory has already cropped up in Supreme Court opinions. In his lone dissent in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, Justice Clarence Thomas cited "the structural advantages of a unitary Executive." He disagreed with the Court that due process demands an American citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decision maker. Thomas wrote, "Congress, to be sure, has a substantial and essential role in both foreign affairs and national security. But it is crucial to recognize that judicial interference in these domains destroys the purpose of vesting primary responsibility in a unitary Executive."

Justice Thomas's theory fails to recognize why our Constitution provides for three co-equal branches of government.

In 1926, Justice Louis Brandeis explained the constitutional role of the separation of powers. He wrote, "The doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by the convention of 1787 not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was not to avoid friction, but, by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of the governmental powers among three departments, to save the people from autocracy."

Eighty years later, noted conservative Grover Norquist, describing the unitary executive theory, echoed Brandeis's sentiment. Norquist said, "you don't have a constitution; you have a king."

One wonders what Bush & Co. are setting up with the new Presidential Directive. What if, heaven forbid, some sort of catastrophic event were to occur just before the 2008 election? Bush could use this directive to suspend the election. This administration has gone to great lengths to remain in Iraq. It has built huge permanent military bases and pushed to privatize Iraq's oil. Bush and Cheney may be unwilling to relinquish power to a successor administration.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, president of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists. Her new book, Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law, will be published in July. Her articles are archived at http://www.marjoriecohn.com/.

Republican candidates push unproven Iraq-911 tie

This Boston Globe article analyzes the claims by Republican presidential candidates, all apparently relying on whipping up fear as their ticket to the White House, that all Muslims are essentially identical anti-American terrorists. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney said, “They want to bring down the West, particularly us. And they’ve come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent.” Senator John McCain called any attempt to cut Iraq war funding “the equivalent of waving a white flag to Al Qaeda.”

GOP Rivals Embrace Unproven Iraq-9/11 Tie
by Peter S. Canellos
Boston Globe
May 27, 2007

WASHINGTON - In defending the Iraq war, leading Republican presidential contenders are increasingly echoing words and phrases used by President Bush in the run-up to the war that reinforce the misleading impression that Iraq was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In the May 15 Republican debate in South Carolina, Senator John McCain of Arizona suggested that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden would “follow us home” from Iraq — a comment some viewers may have taken to mean that bin Laden was in Iraq, which he is not.

Former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani asserted, in response to a question about Iraq, that “these people want to follow us here and they have followed us here. Fort Dix happened a week ago. ”

However, none of the six people arrested for allegedly plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey were from Iraq.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney identified numerous groups that he said have “come together” to try to bring down the United States, though specialists say few of the groups Romney cited have worked together and only some have threatened the United States.

“They want to bring down the West, particularly us,” Romney declared. “And they’ve come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent.”

Assertions of connections between bin Laden and terrorists in Iraq have heated up over the last month, as Congress has debated the war funding resolution. Romney, McCain, and Giuliani have endorsed — and expanded on — Bush’s much-debated contention that Al Qaeda is the main cause of instability in Iraq.

Spokespeople for McCain and Romney say the candidates were expressing their deep-seated convictions that terrorists would benefit if the United States were to withdraw from Iraq. The spokesmen say that even if Iraq had no connection to the Sept. 11 attacks, Al Qaeda-inspired terrorists have infiltrated Iraq as security has deteriorated since the invasion, and now pose a direct threat to the United States.

But critics, including some former CIA officials, said those statements could mislead voters into believing that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks are now fighting the United States in Iraq .

Michael Scheuer , the CIA’s former chief of operations against bin Laden in the late 1990s, said the comments of some GOP candidates seem to suggest that bin Laden is controlling the insurgency in Iraq, which he is not.

“There are at least 41 groups [worldwide] that have announced their allegiance to Osama bin Laden — and I will bet that none of them are directed by Osama bin Laden,” Scheuer said, pointing out that Al Qaeda in Iraq is not overseen by bin Laden.

Nonetheless, many GOP candidates have recently echoed Bush’s longstanding assertion that Iraq is the “central battlefront” in the worldwide war against Al Qaeda and have declared that Al Qaeda would make Iraq its base of operations if the United States withdraws — notions that Scheuer said do not withstand scrutiny.

“The idea that Al Qaeda will move its headquarters of operation from South Asia to Iraq is nonsense,” said Scheuer.

The belief that there is a clear connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks has been a key determinant of support for the war. A Harris poll taken two weeks before the 2004 presidential election found that a majority of Bush’s supporters believed that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks — a claim that Bush has never made. Eighty-four percent believed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had “strong links” with Al Qaeda, a claim that intelligence officials have long disputed.

But critics have maintained that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney encouraged these ideas by using misleading terms to describe the threat posed by Iraq before the war.

Bush, for instance, repeatedly spoke of Hussein’s support for terrorism — which many Americans apparently took to mean that Hussein supported Al Qaeda in its jihad against the United States. The administration, however, sourced that claim to Hussein’s backing of Palestinian terrorist groups targeting Israel.

Now, some GOP presidential candidates refer to “the terrorists” as one group, blurring distinctions between Al Qaeda, which has attacked the United States repeatedly, and groups that former intelligence officials say have not targeted the United States.

Romney said Friday: “You see, the terrorists are fighting a war on us. We’ve got to make sure that we’re fighting a war on them.”

Romney’s comment in the earlier debate that “they’ve come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda” struck some former intelligence officials as particularly misleading. Shia and Sunni, they said, are branches of Islam and not terrorist groups. There are an estimated 300 million Sunni Muslims in the Middle East, many of them fighting Al Qaeda.

“Are Shia and Sunni together? Is the Muslim Brotherhood cooperating with all these other groups? No,” said Judith Yaphe, a former CIA Iraq analyst.

“There’s a tendency to exaggerate in a debate,” she added. “You push the envelope as far as you can.”

No point has been emphasized more strongly at GOP debates than the link between the Iraq war and Al Qaeda. During the debates about war funding, GOP leaders have downplayed the role of sectarian violence in Iraq and emphasized the role of Al Qaeda.

On Friday, McCain called any attempt to cut Iraq war funding, “the equivalent of waving a white flag to Al Qaeda.”

But specialists say that the enemy the military calls “Al Qaeda Iraq” is a combination of Iraqi jihadists and an unknown number of fighters from countries throughout the Middle East. “AQI” came together after the US invasion. And while there is evidence that AQI members coordinate attacks among themselves, there is little evidence that they coordinate closely with bin Laden.

In pressing his case for continued war funding, Bush last week said a previously classified intelligence report indicated that bin Laden had sent a messenger in early 2005 to urge the late Iraqi terrorist chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to aim more attacks at the United States.

But there is no further evidence that bin Laden, who is believed to be hiding along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, exerts control over Al Qaeda Iraq, according to a senior military official in Baghdad in an interview last week.

“We don’t have any direct information that would link Al Qaeda Iraq to getting e-mails, memos, whatever, from bin Laden,” the military official said, speaking under condition of anonymity.

A McCain spokesman said the senator did not mean to suggest in his debate comments that bin Laden was in Iraq. But aides to Romney and McCain, in interviews, insisted that the candidates are not exaggerating when they speak of bin Laden and the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

“The larger point shouldn’t be in dispute,” said Randy Scheunemann , McCain’s foreign policy adviser. “If there’s a territory where Al Qaeda is left unmolested, free to plan, conduct, and train for operations, they will do so.”

Romney’s national press secretary, Kevin Madden, said the former governor’s linking of Shia, Sunni, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood was based on their common hostility to the West. “I think [Romney’s statement] was much more directed at intent — they all share a common ideology or intent to bring down Western governments,” Madden said. “There’s a shared attempt to fight any beachhead of democracy in that region.”

Analysts say that Hamas and Hezbollah are participating in democratic governments and that the leaders of Shi’ite militias are part of the Iraqi government.

“All of the bad actors in the Middle East get mixed up in people’s minds,” said Andrew Kohut , director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, which has polled extensively on views on Iraq. “That’s why it was easy to play on the perception that Saddam Hussein got together with Osama bin Laden and said ‘Let’s fly some planes into buildings.’ Saddam Hussein was seen as a bad guy in the Middle East, and so it all gets jumbled up in people’s thinking.”

American Congress surrenders to Bush, part 2

More on the complete and total surrender of the American Congress to Commander-in-Chief Bush, from the World Socialist Web Site. Excerpts:

It is no doubt puzzling to many that, despite the massive popular opposition to Bush and the Iraq war, the Democrats are powerless against the Bush administration. In the past—in the run-up to the 2003 invasion and in the 2004 presidential election—the Democrats justified their prostration and complicity by the supposedly overwhelming popular support for the president.

The fundamental reason for the Democrats’ impotence is the character of the Democratic Party. It is, no less than the Republicans, a party of US imperialism. The Democrats have from the onset supported the basic imperialist aims underlying the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the broader striving of the American financial elite to utilize its military power to dominate the world’s resources and markets.

The war was never simply “Bush’s war.” The Democrats repeated the lies used by the administration to drag the American people into the war and supplied the necessary votes in Congress to give Bush the authority to launch an unprovoked war of aggression. Their criticisms have been directed not against the war itself, but rather against the administration’s incompetence in conducting it and the military and political disaster it has produced.

The Democrats have done, and will do, nothing to actually halt the war or impede its expansion, because the overwhelming consensus within the US ruling elite is that any outcome perceived as a defeat for the United States would have catastrophic consequences for the global position of American capitalism.

The Republican Party, no matter how unpopular and discredited among the people, prevails because it represents most directly the interests of the most determined and ruthless sections of the ruling elite. The Democrats, on the other hand, serve a very specific function within the political establishment. They defend the basic interests of the ruling class, while promoting the fiction that their party is something it is not now and never was—a party of average working people. This is what imparts to the Democratic Party its inveterate duplicity, half-heartedness and cowardice.

...

It is instructive to review the process by which the Democratic leadership has come to its final capitulation to Bush. When the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress last January, propelled into power by the massive antiwar vote in the November 2006 congressional elections, they began by relegating the entire question of the war to the background.

Pelosi’s “100 hours” legislative agenda at the start of the 110th Congress entirely ignored the issue of the war. The resulting anger and indignation among Democratic voters, intensified by Bush’s January 10 announcement of a “surge” of tens of thousands of additional troops into Iraq, compelled the party leadership to shift tactics. What followed was an elaborate and carefully calculated effort to dupe the population into believing that the Democrats were seeking to end the war, while they swore off any actions that would actually impede its prosecution.

This included the non-binding resolutions against the “surge” in February. Beginning in March the Democrats passed measures in the House and Senate that gave Bush his requested funds to continue the war, with various timetables attached for partially withdrawing US combat troops. All of the Democratic proposals allowed for an indefinite continued presence of tens of thousands of troops after the supposed deadlines for withdrawal.

When Bush, on May 1, vetoed the Democratic bill that resulted from negotiations between the House and Senate, the end game was already clear. Democratic leaders in both houses gave repeated assurances that they would under no circumstances cut off funding “for the troops,” even as the toll of American soldiers killed and wounded soared, and Iraq sank ever further into a state of hellish chaos, death and destruction.

They announced that they would come up with a bill acceptable to Bush prior to the May 28 Memorial Day holiday, producing the inevitable and final capitulation that has now occurred.

At every step of the way, the Democratic leadership was aided and abetted by supposedly antiwar Democrats such as the Out of Iraq caucus, who provided the necessary votes to pass war-funding measures, and left-liberal forces such as the Nation magazine and the leaders of protest groups such as United for Peace and Justice, who presented the Democratic Party as a genuine vehicle for opposing and ending the war.

These events have fully confirmed the analysis and perspective of the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site. On November 8, one day after the midterm elections, the WSWS published an editorial board statement that said:

“The Democratic Party is the beneficiary of overwhelming antiwar sentiment that it did nothing to encourage and which stands in stark opposition to its own pro-war policy. There is a vast chasm between the massive antiwar sentiment within the electorate and the commitment of Democratic Party leaders to ‘victory in Iraq’ and continued prosecution of the ‘war on terror.’...

“Those who voted for the Democratic Party in order to express their opposition to the Bush administration and the war will rapidly discover that a Democratic electoral victory will produce no significant change in US policy, either abroad or at home.”

Bush authorizes new covert action against Iran

As one of the comments to this ABC News article points out, "Wasn’t too long after Johnson started covert programs against North Vietnam (Operation 34A) that the 'Tonkin Gulf Incident' took place, escalating the war in Vietnam." As another comment speculates, "this so called surge in Iraq was just positioning troops to take on Iran." With other news that Bush is planning to double the combat troops in Iraq by Christmas, it does look like we might have another war on our hands just in time for the 2008 elections.

Bush Authorizes New Covert Action Against Iran
by Brian Ross / Richard Esposito
ABC News
May 23, 2007

The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a “nonlethal presidential finding” that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions.

“I can’t confirm or deny whether such a program exists or whether the president signed it, but it would be consistent with an overall American approach trying to find ways to put pressure on the regime,” said Bruce Riedel, a recently retired CIA senior official who dealt with Iran and other countries in the region.

A National Security Council spokesperson, Gordon Johndroe, said, “The White House does not comment on intelligence matters.” A CIA spokesperson said, “As a matter of course, we do not comment on allegations of covert activity.”

The sources say the CIA developed the covert plan over the last year and received approval from White House officials and other officials in the intelligence community.

Officials say the covert plan is designed to pressure Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment program and end aid to insurgents in Iraq.

“There are some channels where the United States government may want to do things without its hand showing, and legally, therefore, the administration would, if it’s doing that, need an intelligence finding and would need to tell the Congress,” said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism official.

Current and former intelligence officials say the approval of the covert action means the Bush administration, for the time being, has decided not to pursue a military option against Iran.

“Vice President Cheney helped to lead the side favoring a military strike,” said former CIA official Riedel, “but I think they have come to the conclusion that a military strike has more downsides than upsides.”

The covert action plan comes as U.S. officials have confirmed Iran had dramatically increased its ability to produce nuclear weapons material, at a pace that experts said would give them the ability to build a nuclear bomb in two years.

Riedel says economic pressure on Iran may be the most effective tool available to the CIA, particularly in going after secret accounts used to fund the nuclear program.

“The kind of dealings that the Iranian Revolution Guards are going to do, in terms of purchasing nuclear and missile components, are likely to be extremely secret, and you’re going to have to work very, very hard to find them, and that’s exactly the kind of thing the CIA’s nonproliferation center and others would be expert at trying to look into,” Riedel said.

Under the law, the CIA needs an official presidential finding to carry out such covert actions. The CIA is permitted to mount covert “collection” operations without a presidential finding.

“Presidential findings” are kept secret but reported to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and other key congressional leaders.

The “nonlethal” aspect of the presidential finding means CIA officers may not use deadly force in carrying out the secret operations against Iran.

Still, some fear that even a nonlethal covert CIA program carries great risks.

“I think everybody in the region knows that there is a proxy war already afoot with the United States supporting anti-Iranian elements in the region as well as opposition groups within Iran,” said Vali Nasr, adjunct senior fellow for Mideast studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“And this covert action is now being escalated by the new U.S. directive, and that can very quickly lead to Iranian retaliation and a cycle of escalation can follow,” Nasr said.

Other “lethal” findings have authorized CIA covert actions against al Qaeda, terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

Also briefed on the CIA proposal, according to intelligence sources, were National Security Advisor Steve Hadley and Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams.

“The entire plan has been blessed by Abrams, in particular,” said one intelligence source familiar with the plan. “And Hadley had to put his chop on it.”

Abrams’ last involvement with attempting to destabilize a foreign government led to criminal charges.

He pleaded guilty in October 1991 to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress about the Reagan administration’s ill-fated efforts to destabilize the Nicaraguan Sandinista government in Central America, known as the Iran-Contra affair. Abrams was later pardoned by President George H. W. Bush in December 1992.

In June 2001, Abrams was named by then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to head the National Security Council’s office for democracy, human rights and international operations. On Feb. 2, 2005, National Security Advisor Hadley appointed Abrams deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for global democracy strategy, one of the nation’s most senior national security positions.

As earlier reported on the Blotter on ABCNews.com, the United States has supported and encouraged an Iranian militant group, Jundullah, that has conducted deadly raids inside Iran from bases on the rugged Iran-Pakistan-Afghanistan “tri-border region.”

U.S. officials deny any “direct funding” of Jundullah groups but say the leader of Jundullah was in regular contact with U.S. officials.

American intelligence sources say Jundullah has received money and weapons through the Afghanistan and Pakistan military and Pakistan’s intelligence service. Pakistan has officially denied any connection.

A report broadcast on Iranian TV last Sunday said Iranian authorities had captured 10 men crossing the border with $500,000 in cash along with “maps of sensitive areas” and “modern spy equipment.”

A senior Pakistani official told ABCNews.com the 10 men were members of Jundullah.

The leader of the Jundullah group, according to the Pakistani official, has been recruiting and training “hundreds of men” for “unspecified missions” across the border in Iran.

Why Bush hasn't been impeached

Great article from Salon on how Bush actually does represent us Americans all too well.

Why Bush hasn't been impeached
Congress, the media and most of the American people have yet to turn decisively against Bush because to do so would be to turn against some part of themselves.
By Gary Kamiya
Salon
May 22, 2007

The Bush presidency is a lot of things. It's a secretive cabal, a cavalcade of incompetence, a blood-stained Church Militant, a bad rerun of "The Godfather" in which scary men in suits pay ominous visits to hospital rooms. But seen from the point of view of the American people, what it increasingly resembles is a bad marriage. America finds itself married to a guy who has turned out to be a complete dud. Divorce -- which in our nonparliamentary system means impeachment -- is the logical solution. But even though Bush cheated on us, lied, besmirched our family's name and spent all our money, we the people, not to mention our elected representatives and the media, seem content to stick it out to the bitter end.

There is a strange disconnect in the way Americans think about George W. Bush. He is extraordinarily unpopular. His approval ratings, which have been abysmal for about 18 months, have now sunk to their lowest ever, making him the most unpopular president in a generation. His 28 percent approval rating in a May 5 Newsweek poll ties that of Jimmy Carter in 1979 after the failed Iran rescue mission. Bush's unpopularity has emboldened congressional Democrats, who now have no qualms about attacking him directly and flatly asserting that his Iraq war is lost.

Some of them have also been willing to invoke the I-word -- joining a large number of Americans. Several polls taken in the last two years have shown that large numbers of Americans support impeachment. An Angus Reid poll taken in May 2007 found that a remarkable 39 percent of Americans favored the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. An earlier poll, framed in a more hypothetical way, found that 50 percent of Americans supported impeaching Bush if he lied about the war -- which most of that 50 percent presumably now believe he did. Vermont has gone on record in calling for his impeachment, and a number of cities, including Detroit and San Francisco, have passed impeachment resolutions. Reps. John Murtha and John Conyers and a few other politicians have floated the idea. And there is a significant grassroots movement to impeach Bush, spearheaded by organizations like After Downing Street. Even some Republicans, outraged by Bush's failure to uphold right-wing positions (his immigration policy, in particular), have begun muttering about impeachment.

Bush's unpopularity is mostly a result of Iraq, which most Americans now believe was a colossal mistake and a war we cannot win. But his problems go far beyond Iraq. His administration has been dogged by one massive scandal after the other, from the Katrina debacle, to Bush's approval of illegal wiretapping and torture, to his unparalleled use of "signing statements" to disobey laws he disagrees with, to the outrageous Gonzales and U.S. attorneys affair.

In response to these outrages, a growing literature of pro-impeachment books, from "The Case for Impeachment" by Dave Lindorff and Barbara Olshansky to "The Impeachment of George W. Bush" by Elizabeth Holtzman to "U.S. v. Bush" by Elizabeth de la Vega, argue not only that Bush's misdeeds are clearly impeachable, but also that a failure to impeach a rogue president bent on amassing unprecedented power will threaten our most cherished traditions. As Lindorff and Olshansky conclude, "If we fail to stand up for the Constitution now, it may be only a piece of paper by the end of President Bush's second term. Then it will be time to be afraid."

Yet the public's dislike of Bush has not translated into any real move to get rid of him. The impeach-Bush movement has not really taken off yet, and barring some unforeseen dramatic development, it seems unlikely that it will. Even if there were a mass popular movement to impeach Bush, it's far from clear that Congress, which alone has the power to initiate impeachment proceedings, would do anything. The Democratic congressional majority has been at best lukewarm to the idea. In any case, their constituents have not demanded it forcefully or in such numbers that politicians feel they must respond. Democrats, and for that matter Americans of all political persuasions, seem content to watch Bush slowly bleed to death.

Why? Why was Clinton, who was never as unpopular as Bush, impeached for lying about sex, while Bush faces no sanction for the far more serious offense of lying about war?

The main reason is obvious: The Democrats think it's bad politics. Bush is dying politically and taking the GOP down with him, and impeachment is risky. It could, so the cautious Beltway wisdom has it, provoke a backlash, especially while the war is still going on. Why should the Democrats gamble on hitting the political jackpot when they're likely to walk away from the table big winners anyway?

These realpolitik considerations might be sufficient by themselves to prevent Congress from impeaching Bush. Impeachment is a strange phenomenon -- a murky combination of the legal, the political and the emotional. The Constitution offers no explicit guidance on what constitutes an impeachable offense, stating only that a president can be impeached and, if convicted, removed from office for treason, bribery "or other high crimes and misdemeanors." As a result, politicians contemplating impeachment take their cues from a number of disparate factors -- not just a president's misdeeds, but a cost-benefit analysis. And Congress tends to follow the cost-benefit analysis. If you're going to kill the king, you have to make sure you succeed -- and there's just enough doubt in Democrats' minds to keep their swords sheathed.

But there's a deeper reason why the popular impeachment movement has never taken off -- and it has to do not with Bush but with the American people. Bush's warmongering spoke to something deep in our national psyche. The emotional force behind America's support for the Iraq war, the molten core of an angry, resentful patriotism, is still too hot for Congress, the media and even many Americans who oppose the war, to confront directly. It's a national myth. It's John Wayne. To impeach Bush would force us to directly confront our national core of violent self-righteousness -- come to terms with it, understand it and reject it. And we're not ready to do that.

The truth is that Bush's high crimes and misdemeanors, far from being too small, are too great. What has saved Bush is the fact that his lies were, literally, a matter of life and death. They were about war. And they were sanctified by 9/11. Bush tapped into a deep American strain of fearful, reflexive bellicosity, which Congress and the media went along with for a long time and which has remained largely unexamined to this day. Congress, the media and most of the American people have yet to turn decisively against Bush because to do so would be to turn against some part of themselves. This doesn't mean we support Bush, simply that at some dim, half-conscious level we're too confused -- not least by our own complicity -- to work up the cold, final anger we'd need to go through impeachment. We haven't done the necessary work to separate ourselves from our abusive spouse. We need therapy -- not to save this disastrous marriage, but to end it.

At first glance it seems odd that Bush's fraudulent case for war has saved him. War is the most serious action a nation can undertake, and lying to Congress and the American people about the need for war is arguably the most serious offense a public official can commit, short of treason. But the unique gravity of war surrounds it with a kind of patriotic force field. There is an ancient human deference to The Strong Man Who Will Defend Us, an atavistic surrender to authority that goes back through Milosevic, to Henry V, to Beowulf and the ring givers, and ultimately to Cro-Magnon tribesmen huddled around the campfire at the feet of the biggest, strongest warrior. Even when it is unequivocally shown that a leader lied about war, as is the case with Bush, he or she is still protected by this aura. Going to war is the best thing a rogue president can do. It's like taking refuge in a church: No one can come and get you there. There's a reason Bush kept repeating, "I'm a war president. I'm a war president." It worked, literally, like a charm.

And many of the American people shared Bush's views. A large percentage of the American people, and their elected representatives, accepted Bush's unlimited authority to do whatever he wanted in the name of "national security." And they reaffirmed this acceptance when, long after his fraudulent case for war had been exposed as such, they reelected him. Lindorff and Olshansky quote former Republican Sen. Lowell Weicker, who justifies his opposition to impeachment by saying, "Bush obviously lied to the country and the Congress about the war, but we have a system of elections in this country. Everyone knew about the lying before the 2004 elections, and they didn't do anything about it ... Bush got elected. The horse is out of the barn now."

To be sure, the war card works better under some circumstances than others. It is arguable that if there had been no 9/11, Bush's fraudulent case for war really would have resulted in his impeachment -- though this is far from certain. But 9/11 did happen, and as a result, large numbers of Americans did not just give Bush carte blanche but actively wanted him to attack someone. They were driven not by policy concerns but by primordial retribution, reflexive and self-righteous rage. And it wasn't just the masses who were calling for the United States to reach out and smash someone. Pundits like Henry Kissinger and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman also called for America to attack the Arab world. Kissinger, according to Bob Woodward's "State of Denial," said that "we need to humiliate them"; Friedman said we needed to "go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something." As Friedman's statement indicates, who we smashed was basically unimportant. Friedman and Kissinger argued that attacking the Arab world would serve as a deterrent, but that was a detail. For many Americans, who Bush attacked or the reasons he gave, didn't matter -- what mattered was that we were fighting back.

To this day, the primitive feeling that in response to 9/11 we had to hit hard at "the enemy," whoever that might be, is a sacred cow. America's deference to the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach is profound: It's the gut belief that still drives Bush supporters and leads them to regard war critics as contemptible appeasers. This is why Bush endlessly repeats his mantra "We're staying on the attack."

The unpleasant truth is that Bush did what a lot of Americans wanted him to. And when it became clear after the fact that Bush had lied about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, it made no sense for those Americans to turn on him. Truth was never their major concern anyway -- revenge was. And if we took revenge on the wrong person, well, better a misplaced revenge than none at all.

For those who did not completely succumb to the desire for primitive vengeance but were convinced by Bush's fraudulent arguments about the threat posed by Saddam, the situation is more ambiguous. Now that his arguments have been exposed and the war has become a disaster, they feel let down, even betrayed -- but not enough to motivate them to call for Bush's impeachment. This is because they cannot exorcise the still-mainstream view that Bush's lies were justifiable and even noble, Straussian untruths told in support of what Bush believed to be a good cause. According to this line of thinking, since Bush and his neocon brain trust really believed that Saddam Hussein was a dangerous tyrant, the lies they told in whipping up support for war were, while reprehensible, somewhat forgivable.

In Elizabeth de la Vega's book on impeachment, framed as a fictitious indictment of Bush for conspiring to defraud the United States, she argues that from a legal standpoint it doesn't matter that Bush may have believed his lies were in the service of a higher good -- he's still guilty of fraud. In a brilliant stroke, de la Vega compares the Bush administration's lies to those told by Enron executives -- who were, of course, rightfully convicted.

The problem is that the American people are not judging Bush by the standards of law. The Bush years have further weakened America's once-proud status as a nation of laws, not of men. The law, for Bush, is like language for Humpty Dumpty: it means just what he chooses it to mean, neither more nor less. This attitude has become disturbingly widespread -- which may explain why Bush's illegal wiretapping, his approval of torture, and his administration's partisan purge of U.S. district attorneys have not resulted in wider outrage.

This society-wide diminution of respect for law has helped Bush immeasurably. It is not just the law that America has turned away from, but what the law stands for -- accountability, memory, history and logic itself. That anonymous senior Bush advisor who spoke with surreal condescension of "the reality-based community" may have summed up our cultural moment more acutely than anyone else in years. A society without memory, driven by ephemeral emotions, which demands no consistency from its leaders but only gusty patriotism, is a society that is not about to engage in the painful self-examination that impeachment would mean.

A corollary to the decline of logic is our acceptance of the universality of spin. It no longer seems odd to us that a president should lie to get what he wants. In this regard, Bush, the most sanctimonious of presidents, must be seen as having degraded traditional American values more than the most relativist, Nietzsche-spouting postmodernist.

All of these factors -- the sacrosanct status of war, the public's complicity in an irrational demonstration of raw power, the loss of respect for law, logic and memory, the bland acceptance of spin and lies, the public unconcern about the fraudulence of Bush's actions -- have created a situation in which it is widely accepted that Bush's lies about Iraq were not impeachable or even that scandalous, but merely a matter of policy. Just as conservatives lamely charged that the Scooter Libby case represented the "criminalization of politics," so the conventional wisdom holds that distorting evidence to justify a war may be slightly reprehensible, but is not worth making much of a fuss about, and is certainly not impeachable.

The establishment media, which has tended to treat impeachment talk as if it were the unseemly rantings of half-crazed hordes, has clearly bought this paradigm. In this view, those who want to impeach Bush, or who are simply vehemently critical of him, are partisan extremists outside the mainstream of American discourse. This decorous approach has begun to weaken. A recent U.S. News and World Report cover read, "Bush's last stand: He's plagued by a hostile Congress, sinking polls, and an unending war. Is he resolute or delusional?" When centrist newsweeklies begin using words drawn from psychiatric manuals, it may be time for Karl Rove to get worried. But it takes time to turn the Titanic. The years of deference to the War Leader cannot be overcome that quickly.

For all these reasons, impeachment, however justified or salutary it would be -- and I believe it would be both justified and salutary -- remains a long shot. Bush will probably escape the fate of Andrew Johnson and the disgrace of Richard Nixon. But he's not home free yet. The culture of spin is also the culture of spectacle, and a sudden, theatrical event -- a lurid accusation made by a former official, a colorful revelation of a very specific and memorable Bush lie -- could start the scandal machine going full speed. Even the war card cannot be played indefinitely. If Bush were to withdraw the troops from Iraq, and the full dimensions of America's defeat were to become apparent, all of his war-president potency would backfire and he would be in much greater danger of being impeached. Congress and the media both gain courage as the polls sink, and if Bush's numbers continue to hit historic lows, they will turn on him with increasing savagery. If everything happens just so, the downfall of the House of Bush could be shocking in its swiftness.

Strategy for ending the war, courtesy of Mike Gravel (Democratic candidate for president)

Mother Jones has a piece on Mike Gravel, the "radical" Democratic candidate for president who wants to end the war and abolish the income tax, among other things. Here is his strategy for how Congress can end the war. I think it makes a lot of sense.

...it is on the issue of the Iraq war that Gravel could prove embarrassing to the Democratic mainstream by relentlessly pointing out that Democrats could stop the war—if they choose to exercise their legislative power. “What we need to do is to create a constitutional confrontation between the Congress and the president,” he says. “Most people have forgotten the Congress is more powerful than the president.” Never mind impeachment, Gravel says: “That’s a red herring right now. It would take over a year to screw around with it.” Instead, he proposes a law commanding the president to bring the troops home. In 60 days. “The Democrats have the votes in the House to pass it. In the Senate, they will filibuster it. Fine. The Majority Leader starts a cloture vote the first day. Fails to get cloture. Fine. The next day—another vote on cloture. And the next day, and the next day, Saturdays and Sundays, no vacation—vote every single day. The dynamic is that now you give people enough time to weigh in and put pressure on those voting against cloture.” (Here, Gravel knows whereof he speaks: As a senator, he filibustered legislation to extend the draft; eventually, a deal was cut to end it in two years.)

So, he goes on, “I would guess in 15 to 20 days you would have cloture and the bill would pass and go to the president. He would veto it. Wonderful. It comes back to the House and Senate. Normal thing is to try to override and fail. No guts. No leadership. So in the House and Senate every day at noon, you have a vote to override the veto. The Democrats are the leaders—they control the calendar. It only takes half an hour to have these votes. The media will jump on it, you know, `This guy changed his vote,’ etc. But then peace groups can go out into the hustings and get these guys where they live, at home, and I would say that in 30 to 45 days they will override the veto. But it’s got to be on a clean, simple issue, none of this “go out and manage the war, deal with the funds” stuff. We never cut off the funds in Vietnam. I was there. I tried it. I failed. What you have to do is go to their immediate survival. By Labor Day this could be all solved, and the troops be home by Christmas.”

Rudolph Giuliani's aggressive, "hostile enforcer" personality type

In my previous post, the article referred to Republican presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani as "the very archetype of the State Enforcer". I thought this was an interesting term and probably referred to a personality type under some theory of personality, so I looked it up and found this 1999 article analyzing Giuliani's personality.

Can New York mayor Giuliani compromise despite his aggressiveness and moral certitude?
By Joshua Jipson and Will Piatt
St. John’s University
December 12, 1999

What happens when a schoolyard bully, so to speak, moves up to boarding school?

If New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani is successful in his U.S. Senate bid, we’ll find out soon enough.

Regardless of the state in which they are elected, senators are powerful players on a national stage; their political performance, ultimately, affects us all.

At issue, then, is how to predict performance in public office. Our answer: Extrapolate from ingrained personality patterns and past performance.

The dominant feature of Rudy Giuliani’s personality is a controlling, aggressive tendency, which is an attribute instrumental in his past political successes.

During his tenure in the mayor’s office, Giuliani has crusaded vigorously to reduce crime and clean up the streets of New York City. However, in doing so he has berated critics and tormented subordinates not acting fully in accordance with his wishes.

In politics, a combative, crusading political personality can contain the seeds of its own undoing. If past behavior is any indicator of future performance, a Senator Giuliani in short order will embroil himself in controversy.

Conscientiousness, the other prominent element of Giuliani’s personality, provides the underpinnings for honesty, integrity, and strong adherence to moral principle.

But it also can cultivate compulsiveness — and Giuliani seems compelled to attend personally to every detail of a pet project.

A prime example is his micromanagement of New York City’s police department. The U.S. Senate, however, is no place for pouncing on pesky squeegee men and harassing the homeless.

As mayor, Giuliani has been known to veto a budget over minor disagreements, sacrificing broader policy objectives purely to maintain his pride. But functional democracy requires compromising here and forfeiting a contest there, all in the service of progress toward a larger goal. Should Giuliani perpetuate his contentious pattern in the Senate he will merely serve as a personal road block, obstructing the path to his own political success.

Our main concern with Giuliani is his larger personality configuration. When a prominent aggressive tendency combines with moral certitude, the resulting personality prototype is the "hostile enforcer."

These personalities often act as though they have a monopoly on divining right and wrong, believing it is their duty and obligation to punish and control. Giuliani justifies such behavior with the rationale, "The big dog’s gotta eat."

Giuliani may be the biggest dog in New York City, but if elected to the Senate, he’ll have 99 fellow political pooches of like proportions. As surely as the sun rises, some of those senators will cross swords with Giuliani. Simply browbeating or bullying them away, as has been the mayor’s habit, will no longer be an option.

It’s no secret that Giuliani has harbored long-standing presidential ambitions. Reportedly, in college he liked to quip, "Rudolph William Louis Giuliani III, the first Italian Catholic president of the United States."

But as president, his hostility would have global implications. Diplomacy, a vital tool in foreign policy, is not a prevalent trait in personalities such as Giuliani’s.

Case in point: At a 1995 function jointly sponsored by the City of New York and the United Nations, Giuliani stood on-stage at Lincoln Center and ordered Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat to leave the theater.

Apparently, Giuliani tried to curry favor with the strong Jewish community in the city — a constituency that is key to his political fortunes.

Recently, the New York Observer asked, "Can Rudy Giuliani tame the beast within?" Let’s hope he can, for should he fail, the fire he spouts may scorch not only Washington, but instigate a larger conflagration.

If the firebrand Giuliani is to take another step up the political ladder, he must curtail his aggressive impulses and appreciate that sometimes — even at the pinnacle of power — discretion is the better part of valor.

Joshua Jipson is a sophomore English major from Lakeside, Wis. Will Piatt is a sophomore communication major from Monticello, Ill. Aubrey Immelman, associate professor of psychology, contributed to this article.

Ron Paul on blowback and American imperialism

This article from Information Clearing House talks about how all of our politicians studiously avoid the taboo subject of American imperialism and one of the major consequences of it -- namely, making us lots of enemies. Every time we overthrow a government and install a dictatorship, as in the case of Iran, or bomb and lay siege to a country for 10 years, as in the case of Iraq, or support a racist minority's domination and mistreatment of the majority in a region, as in the case of Israel, we make enemies, and they are not the unthinking, freedom-hating maniacs Bush and company want them to be. In fact, prominent members of Al Qaeda tend to be well-educated and come from wealthy families. Probably a lot of us freedom-loving Americans would turn to terrorism if some powerful country invaded us and bombed our parents' houses and tortured our fathers and brothers. Ron Paul should be commended for refusing to conform to the absurd official denial of these basic things.

Ron Paul on Blowback
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
May 17, 2007

Plenty of reasonable people can disagree about foreign policy. What's really strange is when one reasonable position is completely and forcibly excluded from the public debate.

Such was the case after 9-11. Every close observer of the events of those days knows full well that these crimes were acts of revenge for US policy in the Muslim world. The CIA and the 911 Commission said as much, the terrorists themselves proclaimed it, and Osama underscored the point by naming three issues in particular: US troops in Saudi Arabia, US sanctions against Iraq, and US funding of Israeli expansionism.

So far as I know, Ron Paul is the only prominent public figure in the six years since who has given an honest telling of this truth. The explosive exchange occurred during the Republican Presidential debate in South Carolina.

Ron was asked if he really wants the troops to come home, and whether that is really a Republican position.

"Well," he said, "I think the party has lost its way, because the conservative wing of the Republican Party always advocated a noninterventionist foreign policy. Senator Robert Taft didn't even want to be in NATO. George Bush won the election in the year 2000 campaigning on a humble foreign policy –no nation-building, no policing of the world. Republicans were elected to end the Korean War. The Republicans were elected to end the Vietnam War. There's a strong tradition of being anti-war in the Republican party. It is the constitutional position. It is the advice of the Founders to follow a non-interventionist foreign policy, stay out of entangling alliances, be friends with countries, negotiate and talk with them and trade with them."

He was then asked if 9-11 changed anything. He responded that US foreign policy was a "major contributing factor. Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attacked us because we've been over there; we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We've been in the Middle East –- I think Reagan was right. We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. So right now we're building an embassy in Iraq that's bigger than the Vatican. We're building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us. "

And then out of the blue, he was asked whether we invited the attacks.

"I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it, and they are delighted that we're over there because Osama bin Laden has said, 'I am glad you're over on our sand because we can target you so much easier.' They have already now since that time –have killed 3,400 of our men, and I don't think it was necessary."

Then the very archetype of the State Enforcer popped up to shout him down.

"That's really an extraordinary statement," said Rudy Giuliani. "That's an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don't think I've heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th."

Now, this is interesting because it is obvious that Ron never said that we invited the attacks. This was a lie. He said the US foreign policy was a "contributing factor" in why they attacked us, a fact which only a fool or a liar could deny. Guiliani then went on to say that he has never "heard that before" –a statement that testifies to the extent of the blackout on this question.

Ron Paul was invited to respond, and concluded as follows:

"I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback. When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the shah, yes, there was blowback. A reaction to that was the taking of our hostages and that persists. And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free. They come and they attack us because we're over there. I mean, what would we think if we were –- if other foreign countries were doing that to us?"

Wow, he broke the great taboo in American political life! Why this should be a taboo at all is unclear, but there it is. But now that it is finally out in the open, this shocking theory that the terrorists were not merely freedom-hating madmen but perhaps had some actual motive for their crime, let's think a bit more about it.

It is a normal part of human experience that if you occupy, meddle, bully, and coerce, people who are affected by it all are going to get angry. You don't have to be Muslim to get the point. The problem is that most of the American people simply have no idea what has been happening in the last ten years. Most Americans think that America the country is much like their own neighborhood: peaceful, happy, hard working, law abiding. So when you tell people that the US is actually something completely different, they are shocked.

Why would anyone hate us? The problem is that the military wing of the US government is very different from your neighborhood. After the Soviet Union crashed, US elites declared themselves masters of the universe, the only "indispensable nation" and the like. All countries must ask the US for permission to have a nuclear program. If we don't like your government, we can overthrow it. Meanwhile, we sought a global empire unlike any in history: not just a sphere of interest but the entire world. Laurence Vance has the details but here is the bottom line: one-third of a million deployed troops in 134 countries in 1000 locations in foreign countries.

All during the 1990s, the US attempted to starve the population of Iraq, with the result of hundreds of thousands of deaths. Madelyn Albright said on national television that the deaths of 500,000 children (the UN's number) was "worth it" in order to achieve our aims, which were ostensibly the elimination of non-existent, non-US built weapons of mass destruction. Yes, that annoyed a few people. There were constant bombings in Iraq all these years. And let us not forget how all this nonsense began: the first war in 1991 was waged in retaliation for a US-approved Iraqi invasion of its former province, Kuwait. Saddam had good reason to think that the US ambassador was telling the truth about non-interference with Kuwait relations: Saddam was our ally all through the Iran-Iraq war and before.

Ron spoke about complications of the Middle East. One of them is that the enemy we are now fighting, the Islamic extremists, are the very group that we supported and subsidized all through the 1980s in the name of fighting Communism. That's the reason the US knows so much about their bunkers and hiding spots in Afghanistan: US taxdollars created them.

Now, I know this is a lot for the tender ears of Americans to take, who like to think that their government reflects their own values of faith, freedom, and friendliness. But here is the point that libertarians have been trying to hammer home for many years: the US government is the enemy of the American people and their values. It is not peaceful, it is not friendly, it is not motivated by the Christian faith but rather power and imperial lust.

Ron is such a wonderful person that I'm sorry that he had to be the one to tell the truth. One could sense in the debate that he was making an enormous sacrifice here. After Guiliani spoke, the red-state fascists in the audience all started whooping up the bloodlust that the politicians have been encouraging for the last six years –a mindless display of Nazi-like nationalism that would cause the founding fathers to shudder with fear of what we've become. These people are frantic about terrorism and extremism abroad, but they need to take a good hard look in the mirror.
Thank you, Ron, for doing this. We are all in your debt.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com, and author of Speaking of Liberty.