News From A Parallel World

Thank God for quick-thinking officials at Homeland Security and TSA. If not for them, the body of Marilyn Monroe would have been disinterred.

I write tonight of the most recent heroics of these much-maligned public servants. America was in serious jeopardy from a pair of terrorist conspirators from England, 26-year-old Leigh Van Bryan and 24-year-old Emily Bunting.

Federal officials and Los Angeles Airport security believe that Bunting was prepared to act as lookout while Van Bryan raided Monroe’s tomb. Agents searched their luggage looking for spades and shovels.

You are thinking I’m making this up. I’m not. None of it. Not even the part about the shovels.

After subjecting each to a complete body search, Homeland Security officials put the handcuffed suspects inside a cage in the back of a van and drove them to prison holding cells where they remained for twelve hours.

U.S. security officials had first been alerted by intercepting Van Bryan’s twitter message to friend, which read: “free this week for a quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?”

Bunting’s intercepted message read, “3 weeks (from) today we’re totally in LA, pissing people off on Hollywood Blvd and diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up!”

How and under what circumstances these tweets were intercepted by the United States security has not been disclosed but raises disturbing questions for those Americans who are not yet completely brainwashed or brain dead.

Speculation centers on false accounts the Department of Homeland Security is known to have set up on Twitter last year, which are used to scan networks for ‘sensitive’ words and phrases and then to track the people who use them. The Electronic Privacy Information Center has requested information on the DHS scans under the Freedom of Information Act, however the requests have thus far been ignored.

After their 12-hour incarcerations, Van Bryan and Bunting were returned to the airport and placed on a plane for Birmingham, England, via Paris.

In photos taken of the couple and published in the British press, they look a little shell-shocked.

“The officials told us we were not allowed into the country because of Leigh’s tweet,” Emily told the press. “They wanted to know what we were going to do. They asked why we wanted to destroy America and we tried to explain it meant to get trashed and party. I almost burst out laughing when they asked if I was going to be Leigh’s lookout while he dug up Marilyn Monroe.”

'It got even more ridiculous because the officials searched our suitcases and said they were looking for spades and shovels. They did a full body search on me too. We just wanted to have a good time on holiday. That was all Leigh meant in his tweet. He would not hurt anyone.'

Van Bryan said, “It’s just so ridiculous. It’s almost funny but at the time it was really scary. The Homeland Security agents were treating me like some kind of terrorist. I kept saying to them that they got the wrong meaning from my tweet, but they just told me, ‘You’ve really fucked up, boy.’”

The story does not quite end there, not from my perspective. When it hit the press, the response was rather interesting. Many Americans blamed the couple for being careless. One useless asshole named Kevin W. Benson wrote, “After 9/11 what do you expect after saying something like that... I mean you should of (sic) just kept the trap shut come over and parties and went (sic) back to the UK with stories to tell your friends. Now whos (sic) stupid.”

Indeed. Ten years after 9/11 it was careless of people entering the United States not to realize that they were entering a paranoid police state where armed goons with insufficient intelligence and no sense of humor could body search them, cuff them, throw them in jail, then kick them out of the country for no sane reason at all.

Another asshole wrote: “Personally those two don’t seem like very good people. I doubt they’re telling the truth about a lot of what they claim happened to them. People as childish as they obviously are will say anything to try and (sic) get sympathy and get others in trouble. Maybe something like this will help them grow up a little...”

To be fair another correspondent began her apology, “On behalf of the remaining 7 sane people in the U.S....”

Memo to future would-be foreign grave robbers: Marilyn Monroe’s body is not in the ground but inside a crypt; you will need heavy equipment. Spades and shovels will not do.

If you are not troubled especially by what no doubt seems a fluke, the response to the story by Good Germans ought to curdle your blood. This is how it happens. The authorities must be right. A good citizen doesn’t complain. There are good reasons for the rules. They must have done something to deserve it. The police wouldn’t have stopped them if they were behaving themselves.

Now that stops and searches have been extended beyond airports to other transportation hubs and to highways in some places, the surveillance state is following its natural course. Wiretaps were once rare, based on warrants signed by judges, and confined to obvious criminal activities; now your phone calls, e-mails, tweets, and every other communication is open to entrapment by electronic keyword nets. Global positioning chips are embedded in passports and drivers’ licenses.

You could make an offhand remark or a joke, even a ludicrous comment, I’m gonna have lunch with Fidel Castro, and you can find yourself handcuffed in the back of a van.

America, land of the free. Come on in, we’ve got a cell waiting for you.

That thing Hollywood does, the ‘remake’ thing, has always bothered me.

Seems to me there are two reasons for remaking a film. One is where the original idea was great but the film itself didn’t live up to it. The other is where nobody’s got any ideas at all and thinks, what the hey, we can squeeze a few more bucks out of this one.

Lately I’ve been getting really annoyed. I think it’s because I’m seeing the ads for the Hollywood production of ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,’ a remake of the brilliant BBC production of around 30 years ago. Reviewers seem not to have viewed the original, that’s the only excuse I can come up with for the praise being lavished on this one.

Let me explain. It’s not simply that Alec Guiness is George Smiley and it doesn’t matter a whit how good Oldman is. It’s not simply that the original was not some 2-hour, condensed for the maximum attention span of a movie-goer in America piece of crap, but around six hours of carefully constructed, meticulously respectful film. It’s more like this: there is the character of Connie Sachs, the booted-out head of Circus research, in forced retirement when a resurrected Smiley seeks her ‘memory’, who is played by Beryl Reid. Beryl Reid is so good that no one, no one should be permitted to even think of inhabiting that character again. It should be unlawful.

When Guiness signed on to play Smiley, the film had its choice of any actor in the world for just about any role because these guys would kill to play with him. David Cornwell, who created the stories involving Smiley, was never happy with filmic productions until this one. For his part, Guiness was a nervous mess playing opposite Reid in those scenes and anyone viewing this film knows why.

The original is and was a stunning production. There is and was no decent reason for remaking it other than money.

The same thing recently happened with the American remake of a BBC production of ‘State of Play.’ Apart from the probably unfortunate title, there is nothing in the original that required change. It is brilliant, a compelling, nerve-wracking film of suspense about politics, corporate operations, journalism, and police work that matches anything else produced over the last ten years.

I did see the American remake. It’s got decent acting and direction but, again, it took a 6-hour film and condensed it to 2. You cannot take a great film and chop out two-thirds of it and still have something as good as the original. You can take crap, maybe, and do something useful with it, but not a great work. So, why bother?

There are plenty of other examples. They keep remaking ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers,’ and each one is worse than the ones which preceded it. What was wrong with the original?

They did it with ‘The In-Laws’, a Peter Falk-Alan Arkin comedy, remade and I suppose ‘brought up to date’ with Albert Brooks and Michael Douglas. It stunk.

What’s the point, people? If you’re going to remake something, find something lousy; that way, you might be doing someone a favor.

True, not every remake is as horrible as the Brooks-Douglas catastrophe but still...

The American remake of ‘Cousin Cousine’, turning it into ‘Cousins’, wasn’t half bad, and Lloyd Bridges was great, and at least one could say, hey, the original is in French and this way you get it domesticated and without subtitles.

The same cannot be said for ‘Manchurian Candidate.’

You know these things happen because you’ve got a bunch of overpaid, no-imagination hacks sitting around a polished Rosewood table in Hollywood bereft of ideas and unable to distinguish the good from the bad among the scripts piled in the corner of everybody’s offices, and someone says, “I’ve got an idea.”

“Let’s remake ‘Gone With The Wind’ and update it. We’ll put it in Detroit at the time of the riots.”

I’m also unhappy with pointless sequels and numerous imitations, but at least the originals remain. Stallone ruined a fine film by producing a dozen sequels, probably for the money and because he’s no genius.

The imitators always blow it because they don’t understand why the original was so good. If they did, they’d be making their own instead of trying to copy. So they think, let’s see, ‘Animal House’, a fraternity, hazing, alcohol, girls, parade, got it; they think Belushi, we’ll find us a fat, gross guy who can raise his eyebrows. But Belushi was a dancer and an acrobat, and a genius, and you aren’t going to find another one for your horse shit knock-off, and John Landis is not going to direct.

Anyone out there try ‘Caddyshack 2’? Hope the stains came out.

Do yourself a huge favor. Rent or borrow ‘Tinker Tailor,’ the original, the real one. Make a nice meal and hunker in with it. Treat yourself well. Same with ‘State of Play.’ There is no reason to visit these ‘pan-and-scan’ remakes any more than there’s a reason for reading a Readers’ Digest version of a great novel.

You deserve the real thing.

I’m watching a live feed, audio and video from downtown Oakland, where several hundred people have been ‘kettled’ by the Oakland Police Department and California Highway Patrol and are being beaten; many are also being arrested.

Occupy Oakland tried to march earlier today to one vacant building but were turned back and had to regroup. The cops knew where the first march was headed, the old Kaiser building, but could not crack the security on the second one, and the march could not be so easily controlled.

The second march was aimed at the YMCA. After clashes with the police, another group marched to City Hall and broke in.

Pepper spray and rubber bullets have been used. People are being beaten. One person set fire to an American flag despite the attempts by others to stop him. Maybe a police provocateur, maybe just a guy with a loose match.

Several occupy veterans say that in an early march there were a couple of people in the crowd who threw objects at the police to incite retaliation; they say nobody recognized these people or had seen them before. The mass media is leading with this, talking about rocks and bottles and how the demonstrators got violent.

It’s been said by many, in war the first casualty is truth. This, for some, is war.

Even Democracy Now gets it wrong, reporting that demonstrators breaking down a fence triggered the police violence, but the fence came down only when the cops ‘kettled’ people –– encircled and trapped marchers –– and people were trying to open a route of escape.

With the live feed is a twitter ticker tape, people tossing ideas, notions, screams, fighting words, imprecations, crazy shit. Some are debating policy in Africa. Someone offering dietary advice. Arguments about violence. One person kept listing the phone numbers for the governor and mayor. Jerry Brown’s phone was shortly removed from service.

A literary type quotes Cicero: “A nation can survive fools or the ambitious, but it cannot survive treason from within.”

A 14-year-old girl, beaten by cops, strapped to a board and loaded into an ambulance. Officer 119, she’s calling out, the badge number, and there are other witnesses to confirm. Any bet on whether he will suffer consequences? Now they’ve got his name: Kirkland. Still taking bets. There are urban combat vehicles in the streets. Now they’re saying Kirkland’s not officer 119. Kirkland’s a private security cop with one of the media outlets.

“Whatever problems I might’ve had with the plans of the group, with some of the things being done, people still have rights. People need a place to sleep. God damn it, we’re trying to feed people here.”

Estimates now more than 200 hundred arrests. A new march is starting, heading down Broadway. Chants. Tear gas.

The twitter commentary is loaded with crap, false accusations, idiots repeating things already discredited, someone using the expression ‘rape’ to describe the cops’ behavior and others then asking, who got raped and some moron saying ‘some girl.’ I remember the ‘sixties but I do not remember people being this ignorant.

On the other hand, twitter’s got messages from everywhere. New York, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Hawaii, Iowa, DC, Phoenix, Seattle, Portland... And England, Egypt, Portugal, Greece. It’s one world now, folks. The only question remaining is, will it be One World Order?

Reports of what CNN is reporting, occupy demonstrators hurling pipes, rocks, bottles, and other objects at police, denied by people at the scene who say few incidents and all of them suspicious for being police agents. Am told this is confirmed by Dan Siegel, once assistant to Mayor Quan, once a Berkeley Student Body President, who talks on his facebook page about how the cops did this in the old days. I also remember it.

Very strong nonviolent tenor, although these people are pissed.

Kirkland’s not the guy but some keep repeating his name, poor bastard.

“You cannot evict an idea” –– message on the marquee at Grand Lake Theater.

Police firing what amount to pellet-filled bean bags at protesters. More shootings. People running. Helicopters. Cops wearing military outfits, using military weapons. This is not the Oakland cops but Homeland Security. One videographer: “The militarization of America’s urban police is visible here tonight.”

Almost none of this in on the news. In the morning, the Bay Area will open the morning paper and get told a story distinctly different from this one.

One participant claims that because Occupy has no leaders, it will be that much harder to destroy. On the other hand, because it has no leaders, its story line will be that much easier to distort and trivialize. If all you see is mainstream media, you will be told that this movement is lost, its original meaning distorted, its participants violent people, anarchists.

Of course, most Americans, if they see the cops beating the crap out of people, think the cops are justified.

This is going to be a very long, hard journey.

We’ve all met them. They live among us, often masquerading as ordinary Americans. Sometimes they are able to carry on with their daily lives giving little hint of the strange malady from which they suffer.

When they are found out, when their disease is exposed, often they deny it, angry or bewildered, and they resist treatment, oh, my, do they resist!

Maybe it’s a matter of discomfort with incarnation in the first place, born into these bodies and restricted to begin with, and then adapting to one’s environment, or thrashing around in a mad attempt.

I’m trying to understand the phenomenon. It’s always there in some form, cultural and political, but we’re in another election cycle and it’s especially present now.

There are exchanges over what the media and commentators refer to as ‘issues’. A classic example these days is the argument about gay marriage.

Personally, I take the same position on gay marriage that Bill Hicks took on gays being able to serve in the military: anyone crazy enough to want to do it should be allowed to, regardless of gender, orientation, or proclivity.

But some people are really upset about it. Marriage, they say, should be between a man and a woman; anything else is ‘unnatural’ or ‘against God’s will’, although to me that seems pretty self-evidently incorrect. I mean, if I’m gay, did God make a mistake?

I’ve never quite understood why people got so worked up over it. So long as nobody’s trying to tell you what to do with your own sexuality, why should you care what anyone does with their own?

But if you charge someone with bigotry on this issue, it’s possible that person will not understand what you mean. Really.

Being a sophisticated, worldly, educated, smart-assed left-winger, I heard that kind of profession of innocence as evidence of either dishonesty or cement-head stupidity. I may have judged a little prematurely.

I’ve met and spoken with, in some cases exchanged e-mails and other correspondence with, some quite nice, otherwise reasonable, people who are against gay marriage, or against all sorts of other social or cultural behavior that to me seems benign. If you challenge them, they will express honest surprise and even astonishment. They have “nothing against gay people,” they will say. I’ve always thought that was a lie. Now, I’m not so sure.

Of course, in one sense, they do have something against gays. And, often, blacks, latinos, and an entire range of people and behaviors. But at least in some cases, I’m convinced they don’t see it that way.

I think it’s really a very simple thing. People want to feel comfortable. A lot of people find that a struggle. They are uncomfortable with themselves, first of all, having been told there’s something wrong with them. In some cases, they’ve been brainwashed with religious propaganda which teaches them what sinners they are. Just coming to some terms with the idea that God’s judging you probably requires as much energy as an ordinary person’s got.

Then, there’s everybody else’s judgments. Parents, lovers, partners, friends, neighbors, strangers, the community one lives in. Holy mother of God, that’s a lot of weight to carry.

For many people, given the strictures of society, given their particular demons, it’s got to be difficult to navigate daily life. They build a picture of the world they can survive in; it may be a fantasy picture but it’s a picture which is psychologically useful enabling them to get through whatever horrors living can bring. And then here come the gays.

I used to think that homophobia was simply a fear of one’s own ‘unacceptable’ sexual instincts, and to some degree I still think so, but there’s something else going on, too. There are, I think, some straights who feel threatened by gays, or blacks, or latinos, or muslims, or anyone who’s different simply because it is jarring to their carefully-constructed fantasy.

It’s axiomatic that people feel threatened when their own sense of reality, their own sense of themselves, is fragile. For most camels, a little straw doesn’t create any difficulties, but for some it’s a ticket for a body cast.

Well, obviously, you can’t build an egalitarian society without breaking a few backs, but perhaps it’s a help to remember that sometimes these people screaming are not faking it.

One of the main reasons I’m so fascinated by Ron Paul is that everybody is scared shitless of him, and I mean everybody.

The Republicans, the establishment Republicans, anyway, really hate him and wish he’d drop dead. They ignore him, when they can, and pretend he’s not there, because when they think they’re going to hurt him on something, jumping on him for some statement he’s made, usually some far-left point of view, he flattens them. They’re wary of him now.

The Democrats are worried about him. It’s not that they think he’d beat Obama in a two-way race because they’re confident enough that the Republicans will never permit Paul to be nominated no matter how many votes he gets –– and there’s reason to believe that some of those votes were made to disappear in Iowa closets; it’s that they worry he might run as a third-party candidate and siphon votes from the President from people angry enough about war and the rest of his police state behavior.

The media now treat him like he’s got a contagious disease. A perusal of the YouTube clips of exchanges he’s enjoyed with anchors and commentators from FOX and other outlets is a lot of fun. The stiff talking heads think they’re going to trap him –– they can’t –– or discuss something trivial –– he calls them on it. Mostly they avoid him. If someone’s got to conduct an interview you get the feeling there’s a drawing of straws in the lunchroom. Too bad I don’t smoke pot anymore. If I did, I’d suck down a joint and watch those videos for hours.

Thing is, presidential candidates in modern times are supposed to slip into their roles and not cause trouble. Obama, being the President, can be dignified, statesmanlike, smiling on cue. Romney, trapped by his political record, is too far left for the GOP, which thinks Obama’s a socialist. So Mitt’s got to tack way to the right just to stay in the race.

Gingrich is of course a sociopath, a crazy person so bleeding dangerous that even the bankers would probably have him shot just to settle their ulcers. The media are okay with him because he’s colorful and will say nearly anything. The ultra-right is not bothered, evidently, by his personal screwing around, lying, and ethics problems, because the ultra-right is hypocritical anyhow and because it will swallow anything to defeat Obama.

Santorum, that sweater, that wife, that cranium of solid rock. He’s reliable.

But Ron Paul. God knows what he’s going to do next. He argues for pulling out of Afghanistan in those debates and the audience bursts into applause. That’s unsettling to the leaders of both parties, who want to forget war as an issue. He gets applause for saying the Patriot Act should be abolished.

Ron Paul calls America’s sanctions against Iran acts of war.

Ron Paul calls Bradley Manning an American hero.

If a Democratic candidate said these things he’d be considered to the left of Kucinich. But a Republican?

And his economic policies freak everybody out, as well. So do his environmental policies. Everybody.

On the Democratic side, I see the postings and the articles attacking him on these things and I’d be taking them at face value except that Paul’s ALSO being attacked on these things by Republicans. You might think the corporations would be in love with his ‘free market’ ravings, but you’d be wrong. He scares them, too. How come? Because a ‘free market’ is no friend to the corporations who depend on federal largesse.

Look at the subsidies alone. A friend sent me an article from the left criticizing Paul for wanting to let the nuclear industry loose, but the article left out something important. Yes, Paul would let them loose; unfortunately for the industry, that would kill it. No more government subsidies would make the cost prohibitive. No more government guarantees on insurance coverage and the plants would be uninsurable.

He makes me nervous, too, of course. True, the corporations already already own the regulatory bodies and essentially have government cover for whatever crimes they want to commit, but how will it be any better with the cover removed? I don’t know.

One thing nobody’s talking about: Paul’s foreign policy would eliminate the use of the army to protect America-based corporations. God, that would be fun to watch, not to mention what a relief for the peoples of Latin America, Africa, and the middle east. Bechtel and Monsanto and the other thugs would no longer be able to count on America’s military to smooth the way in places like Colombia or on the African continent. A Coca-Cola executive running for his worthless life, that would be a treat.

I’m also grateful to Ron Paul. Without him in the race there would be nothing worth thinking about because there would be nothing going on that invited thought.

Obama will certainly kick the shit out of any of these bozos in November, not because he’s been a good President –– you know my opinion on that by now –– but because he will be the only viable candidate not actually creepy and insane. But with Ron Paul hanging around on the fringes, talking his talk, there’s a vivid contrast with the rest of the roster. And if we’re not enjoying the circuses, that’s a real shame, because they’ve already taken away the bread.

I’m so proud. My eyes just welled-up hearing about it, our President recounting how among his most treasured possessions is an American flag, carried by the special ops team which killed Osama Bin Laden and signed by all the members of the team. He didn’t say whether there was any blood on it. I heard that they also brought back two ears and a tail but that these were donated to the Smithsonian.

We’re a civilized nation, so much more civilized than the backward peoples we blow the shit out of. I understand that Hillary Clinton was given the steel pole her Qattari mercenaries used to sodomize 70-year-old Moammar Qaddafi before beating him to death in a drainage ditch in Libya. She sleeps with it under her pillow.

Bin Laden’s killing was much celebrated here in the U.S. Partly, this was because the majority of Americans are sure that he was the ‘mastermind’ behind the attack on the Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon in September, 2001. Partly, it was because we simply identified him as a bad guy and, hence, deserving of execution.

That’s who we are now in the world, the executioners. Forget any other process. Forget trial on the merits, presentation of evidence, any of the trivial accouterments of an old-fashioned justice system. There were a few voices, what about Nuremberg, even the Nazis got trials, but these disappeared in the din of the chorus, USA! USA!

Remember how the war against Afghanistan started? That country was then run by the Taliban, whom we once armed and promoted but you know how that is. The Bush regime, so honest about everything else, accused Bin Laden of 9-11 and demanded that the Taliban turn him over to us. He was thought to be in Afghanistan then.

The Afghan government did what governments the world over do, in accordance with established principles of international law: they asked for the proof. If you show us what amounts to prima facie evidence, we will find him and turn him over to you, they said. Hmmm, we said, proof, there’s always a catch. The FBI, for its part, said that there wasn’t any, actually, which didn’t help.

So we invaded and toppled the government. We don’t got to show you no stinking badges. And we all believed the Bush government about Bin Laden. They’d never lie to us.

So eventually we found him and shot him to death. He was unarmed and not resisting, but those are minor details and inconsequential. We were not interested in a trial. We especially didn’t want to have to deal with anything messy, like proof.

Well, you say, everybody knows he did it. Right? You’re sure, aren’t you?

Based on what, exactly? Based on what you were told. The only testimonial evidence available is so contaminated it wouldn’t make it through a preliminary hearing, one torture victim who got waterboarded a hundred times and who would then testify that he shot Lincoln, and so would you.

Material evidence is nonexistent. There was a reason the FBI persisted in saying that it could not charge Bin Laden.

We needed Bin Laden because we needed an amorphous, shadowy enemy threatening to strike at any time. That way we could frisk people anywhere, search people at places of embarkation, mount spy cameras everywhere, wiretap everybody, and make everyone scared enough not to question what was about to happen in America.

The left in America likes to think it’s so much more sophisticated than the right. We would never believe the junk peddled as news on stations such as FOX. But we swallow whole enormous lies sold on other networks and by other interests. When it came to Bin Laden, everybody was on board, all the television and radio outlets, all the politicians. People were afraid to dissent on this one.

Now the sucker’s dead and the President’s got a flag commemorating the occasion. I’m so proud I could just puke.

This is going to be a really unpopular column. Most of you will hate it. I know that. I’m sorry. I actually had a different column on the screen, making fun of Rick Santorum because he’s such a dunce and it’s enjoyable, once in a while, to slap a dunce upside the head. But events got in the way.

I didn’t watch The Speech tonight. Evidently, the Supreme Leader ran another of his spellbinding oratorical performances at America and, for the most part, America is once again convinced.

On facebook otherwise intelligent people, friends of mine, are raving. “(He) speaks for me tonight,” one wrote. “I’m proud to have a sane, compassionate individual as my President,” wrote another. Lots of others agreed, big numbers of ‘likes’ under the postings.

I don’t care what he said. I’ve heard him speak before. I heard him about fifty or so times in 2008, talking about human dignity, people’s rights, the importance of the constitution, America being a force for good in the world, respect for working people, admiration for whistle-blowers. He was against NAFTA and for closing Guantanamo Prison. We do not torture, he said. I wrote columns back then about hope. I wrote a couple of checks. I even wrote memoranda for someone in his campaign.

I don’t care what he said tonight. I know what he’s done. So do you.

The amazing thing to me is that many of his apologists and supporters can also see it but it seems not to matter.

Many people on the left, people who regard themselves as liberals or progressives, show astonishment at the disconnection between the professed ideals of the right wing and their leaders’ less-than-heroic behavior. How, for example, can people who proclaim allegiance to ‘family values’, their code term for intolerance of the perceived frailties of others, embrace someone like Newt Gingrich, a peccadillo poster boy?

Many of these same people on the left then ignore the behavior of their own President when he repeatedly acts against the very things he so eloquently claims to stand for. It’s absolutely breathtaking. It’s like watching old guard Stalinists explaining away the gulags.

He’s got a nice act going, I’ll give him that. Makes Bill Clinton look clumsy. But when, as the wonks might say, you drill down, what comes up is not milk and honey.

Thing is, it’s not simply an issue or two. It was plain from the beginning that the existing power structure could mousetrap him on Afghanistan. Because the military and CIA do whatever they want, one of the things they can do is manipulate foreign events to create domestic political pressures. I get that.

Obama had to stay in Afghanistan regardless of what he might privately wish to do, even if he understood that it’s a lost cause, a forlorn venture which will do nothing more than offer up more blood in sacrifice to the natural gas pipeline the multinationals wanted. He knew going in that the presidency has been turned into something less noble by the terrible things which have been done over the past fifty years.

He also had some domestic limitations. True, he personally backed the Bush bailouts when, had he not done so, they might well have been rejected. Remember that the first vote went against them. Despite every rhetorical trick, every threat by the FBI –– which told several recalcitrant House members that martial law would result from failure to pass the bank bill –– the House voted ‘no’ because it was flooded with angry e-mails. I well recall the scene, a shell-shocked Nancy Pelosi standing with Treasury officials and a dim-bulb Harry Reid, saying the nation needed the bailout and had better pass it on the second try. So Obama could have said no and it would’ve stuck. The country would’ve been behind him.

But the bankers would have been more than angry. They would’ve realized they hadn’t gotten the tame servant they expected that their campaign bribes secured. Goldman Sachs, after all, had been his largest contributor at more than a million smackers.

Now, three years after being sworn in, Obama is convening a grand jury to investigate and hold accountable all those bankers. Want to bet? They will nail one or two business executives who are not members of the Club, five guys from the mailroom, and the washroom attendant at Citigroup, and they will probably fine some people, but if you think this is a serious initiative I have some derivatives I’d like to sell you.

Try to remember, it wasn’t very long ago that the President reappointed Bernanke, picked a former Citigroup hedge fund manager as his chief of staff, and moved to nominate Larry Summers, the architect of deregulation, to run the World Bank. Does that sound like he’s serious about accountability or about looking as though he’s serious? He’s appointing the damned defendants.

And what about civil liberties? It’s no small thing to throw the 4th Amendment into the trash, but he’s done it. It’s not an accident that domestic surveillance, without warrants, has skyrocketed under Obama, as has the militarization of urban police forces, the deployment of special forces death squads abroad, and the incarceration of minor drug offenders.

No one forced him to keep Bradley Manning in solitary confinement for most of 19 months behind bars, a practice which, along with other modalities used against him, is defined as torture by the United Nations and international human rights organizations.

No one forced him to send his Justice Department into court to defend the secrets of the Bush administration, or to try to stop civil suits against the perpetrators of torture. But he’s done it.

No one forced him to shift energy funds away from non-harmful renewables and toward nuclear power, even after the catastrophe of Fukushima, or to renew the British Petroleum drilling rights in the Gulf, or to oppose California’s more restrictive rules on the treatment and ‘harvesting’ of food animals (the Supreme Court agreed with him yesterday).

No one forced him to renew the idiotic, damaging Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, but he did. Those funds alone would have secured Medicare and protected Social Security.

Remember NAFTA and how it was outsourcing jobs and screwing American labor? Not a peep.

I’m familiar with the arguments in his favor and none of them are even close to being rational. Most are not even honest. There simply are no answers for his complete betrayal of the people who supported him, those most in need, and the country he swore he would serve.

Bill Hicks used to talk about the television show ‘Cops’ which, he said, always had the same plot. A man beats up his wife. Her face looks like a melon. She says to the cops, “He didn’t mean it, officers, he’s a good man, I was just lying down in the driveway and he accidentally backed the truck over my head...”

Abuse victims are famous for letting their abusers off the hook, for going back for more. The abusers are charming. They apologize. They promise to change. They blame others. “He was really trying to do the right thing, officers, but he couldn’t because he didn’t have sixty close personal friends in the Senate.”

Millions have lost their jobs and their homes in America. That wasn’t Obama’s fault, but three years later those people are still screwed and the President is getting around to an investigation. I don’t buy it, or him. It’s an election year gimmick, a bone tossed to the restless mob from a speeding limo. If he meant it, he’d have done it about five minutes after being sworn in, and by now there would be executives in jail and a whole different game on Wall Street.

You know why he didn’t do anything for three years just as well as I do.

Tonight, 24 million American kids went to bed hungry, but Obama’s kids didn’t. If I thought he really cared and was fighting to alleviate that hunger, that misery, maybe I could give him a pass, too, but I don’t think it’s true.

Tonight, while his children sleep safely in the White House, children in Pakistan and Afghanistan and, from reliable reports, several nations in Africa, scream in terror under American bombs. What is it, exactly, that justifies this barbarity?

These are not policies. They are obscenities.

Now the President is ‘warning’ Iran? Based on what? Faked U.N. documents he knows are not true, just as Bush used faked documents to attack Iraq. So more people will die?

Not long ago, there was a meeting with the President and his biggest contributors. I’m catching too much flak, he told them. I have to do something about all those pissed off people. I’m gonna have to ‘investigate’ you people. But don’t worry. I’ll keep it limited, and I’ll make it up to you. Iran’s banking? It’s yours, just like Libya’s.

So please don’t fucking talk to me about how he’s better than the other cretins, or how his hands were tied by not having a Senatorial ‘super majority’ because I know politics very well and am not that bloody stupid. America’s in terrible trouble; it’s gotten far worse under Obama’s hand. That hurts, I know it does, and I wish it wasn’t so, but it’s the truth.

It’s the one thing I share with the President, enjoyment of golf. Even after every awful thing he’s done –– and there are so many it’s hard to keep track anymore –– we’re still on the same side of the field when it comes to this magical game. We both know the deep satisfaction available from drilling a drive down the middle or sinking a breaking 20-foot putt. Makes me think he’s almost human.

One of the best things in golf is the companionship. When you can set out on the 18-hole journey with a friend or two, it’s a special pleasure. So I’m glad that just as I’ve got the great TR, Stan the Man, the occasional Big Bill Dial, and the rare JBD or even my brother from another planet, our chief executive has his own good playing partner, a fellow named Robert Wolf.

Robert and Barack also play basketball together, which I suppose is a fine endeavor, although my own basketball experiences generally involved taller players with longer arms encircling me and taking away the ball.

I wonder what they call each other, Wolf and Obama. Surely Wolf doesn’t call him ‘Mr. President’ or anything formal like that. It’s golf. There are no misters in golf unless we’re talking about Arnold Palmer and even then he’s Arnie to most people. Nicknames, I’d guess. Wolf could call him something like ‘Big O’, but that could be so easily misconstrued. Maybe something like ‘bama’ or ‘Barry.’

The President probably calls him ‘Wolfie.’

Bill Moyers might call him something else:

“Robert Wolf runs the U.S. branch of the giant Swiss bank UBS, which participated in schemes to help rich Americans evade their taxes. During hearings in 2009, Michigan’s Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the permanent subcommittee on investigations, described some of the tricks used by UBS:

“Swiss bankers aided and abetted violations of U.S. tax law by traveling to this country with client code names, encrypted computers, counter- surveillance training, and all the rest of it, to enable U.S. residents to hide assets and money in Swiss accounts.

“The bankers then returned to Switzerland and treated their conduct as blameless since Swiss law says tax evasion is no crime. The Swiss bank before us deliberately entered United States, actively sought U.S. clients and secretly helped those U.S. clients defraud the United States of America.””

Wow! That’s perfidy on a truly grand scale.

I’ve already noted elsewhere and with growing alarm the roster of financial thieves with which Obama has surrounded himself. His new chief of staff was latterly a hedge fund operator at Citigroup, the operation which in a decent society would’ve been allowed to sink in its own slime but which got not only ‘bailed out’ by Bush and Obama but is now bigger than before.

He replaces another chief of staff who’d been a honcho at JPMorgan Chase, Bill Daley, who himself had replaced Rahm Emanuel, who once cleared eighteen million bucks as a ‘rainmaker’, that is to say fixer, at an investment bank, and that’s a world class amount of precipitation.

The new chief of staff is leaving his previous job at the Office of Management and Budget where he had taken over for a guy who is now vice chairman for global banking at Citigroup!

The room is spinning. This gets funnier and more alarming all the time. The President may make speeches about ‘fat cats,’ but those are the people he’s sleeping with when Michelle is not around. He’s comfortable with them, even on the golf course.

They probably have a few good laughs over the taxpayer-funded low-interest loans which the bankers use to reinvest and rake in huge profits. Haha! The taxpayers still think it’s the illegal immigrants and welfare queens.

Maybe he calls him ‘Wolfman.’ Kind of ordinary but it does convey something of his feral sensibilities. ‘Bloodsucker’ would be okay. So he defrauded the American people, hey, everyone was doing it and why single him out? A little tax evasion, a little corruption, we’re sophisticated people here, right?

And the Big O doesn’t mind because Bloodsucker is raising millions for his reelection campaign.

If you’re feeling sick, try not to get any on my shoes, okay?

Two examples of old-fashioned American values.

Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich led his squad on a killing rampage, kicking in doors, throwing grenades into homes, and machine-gunning everyone inside. Twenty-four died, including seven children.

Wuterich and three other Marines were nailed by a snitch and so had to face charges in the 2005 mass murder of innocent and unarmed Iraqis in Haditha. Four others were part of a cover-up. Six had their charges dropped. The seventh was acquitted. Guess it only made sense that the prosecution cut a deal with the sergeant, dropping all charges except one, dereliction of duty. Wuterich is pleading guilty to that and faces a maximum of three months in the brig. Ordering pizza, no doubt.

The defendants got away with it due to what were described as ‘errors’ and problems with inconsistent testimony in the prosecution. Sure. Bet everyone had a nice laugh.

Support the troops, my ass.

On the other hand, Bradley Manning saw video of a helicopter crew shooting down a dozen unarmed people in the street, including a Reuters cameraman, and reveling in it. So appalled was he that he decided to leak it, and about a million other documents, to the internet. For exposing murder and a stunning range of lies and betrayals, Manning has spent nineteen months in military custody, most of it in solitary confinement. He faces life in prison.

Neal Puckett, one of Wuterich’s lawyers, told the press that his client, in accepting the plea bargain, “thought it was the right and honorable thing to do.”

I’m so proud to be a member of the bar.

Meanwhile, the circumstances of Manning’s imprisonment, including being forced to stand naked, sleep deprivation, radical changes in temperature, and solitary confinement, were obviously designed to torture and break him down. The particulars have been condemned by international agencies and legal scholars, a fact you are not likely to see on network news. Might interfere with your enjoyment of the latest American Idol which, as I understand it, was held on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

This country is sick, sick to the core. Anyone who doesn’t recognize that is obviously too drugged or drunk to get out of bed. That’s okay, we can deliver your absentee ballot in person so you can help re-elect the President.

Hard to say what will become of Bradley Manning, an American hero. As to solitary confinement, in case that doesn’t sound so bad, I offer the words of Charles Dickens, visiting the U.S. in 1842 and observing this form of incarceration:

"I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay."

Slumbering humanity, in America that pretty much sums it up.

One of my vast army of correspondents gets a lot of the same mail I get, probably because she’s on the same lists. I’m talking about the Democratic Party, CREDO, MoveOn, and like that. I am not referring to the FBI, although I’m sure we’re both on that list, too, but the FBI doesn’t write to me much anymore.

Louisa likes to write back to these people, usually to explain why they’re barking up the wrong tree or don’t understand the basic problem.

Most recently, she got a letter from one Richard L. Trumka, President of the AFL-CIO, asking her to sign another one of those petitions to President Obama demanding that he do the right thing, this time in rejecting the sweetheart deal his Justice Department has been brokering with the banks which crashed the economy and stole our money. Trumka wants a better settlement than the ‘slap on the wrist’ apparently now on the horizon.

Louisa’s letter to Trumka explained that, basically, she’s tired of internet petitions that don’t do anything and would like to see us all, including the AFL-CIO, put our money where our self interest lies, namely in community-owned, federally-guaranteed, savings and loans.

It will be instructive to see whether Trumka responds. The AFL-CIO is, after all, a part of the problem. Sure, it wants to see a better deal, but perhaps we don’t need better deals. Perhaps we need our public servants to do their jobs, and that includes the President.

The AFL-CIO push is for a better settlement, but I don’t want a settlement. I want those pinstriped executives behind bars and their assets seized.

But that’s not going to happen, not under this administration and not under the administration of any other President whose election would be permitted. And we all know why that is.

The system protects its own. Even the renegade state attorneys general who have broken with their colleagues over the proposed settlement, including, I’m happy to say, my own state’s AG, Kamala Harris, are insiders making an inside deal. They all know what the rules are, and the rules are that nobody tells the banks –– or the other major corporate powers –– what to do. Most of the rules already codified were written by the corporate lawyers in the subcommittee rooms, and if they forgot any they will write them now, on the spot.

Federal judges are available to tidy up.

Look, the thing’s broken. Face it. Fewer and fewer people with more and more money and power, disparity so vast that ordinary politics, even extraordinary politics, will not do the trick. It’s a closed system and it’s rigged, from the federal regulatory agencies to the courts to the cops. The Congress, of course, well, you know...

Like Louisa, I sometimes write back to these guys. They don’t respond, but I don’t expect them to. I just write because it’s psychologically good to push back.

I’m not sure whether Occupy will survive the winter or what form it will have if it does. I am sure that the movement represents a very strong, growing desire in the great center of America to do something about the state we’re in and do it soon.

People are hurting. We heard the President announce more than a year ago that the recession had ended, but whether he actually believed that idiocy doesn’t make it so. He also announced that the U.S. had withdrawn from Iraq, but we’re still there.

The powers that be are telling us we’re supposed to feel better than we do. They’re telling us the reality is something our minds and hearts know doesn’t exist. How long before that dissonance explodes?

We are in a Depression and it is not lifting. Actual unemployment is probably about 20%. The disparity in wealth is greater than at any time in our nation’s history. There are more people per capita in American prisons than in any other country in the world.

The nation was robbed and in turn handed the thieves whatever hadn’t been stolen the first time. The President surrounds himself with representatives of the worst malefactors. The budget is distorted by foreign wars, none of them justifiable in any rational way, and by a domestic security system the reason for which is almost entirely fabricated.

A democracy does not surrender its civil liberties to fight a phantom ‘enemy,’ nor does it need to spy on its own citizenry.

The AFL-CIO wants us to sign petitions protesting the sweetheart deals between the government and the banks when there is very little distinction between the two.

And that’s were we stand as Barack Obama prepares his State of the Union address, a return, we’ve been told by his flacks, to the ‘populist’ rhetoric which worked in 2008, with more sacrifices by those who can’t afford them and more breaks for those who bought them.

Petitions to the President just aren’t gonna do it, folks.

On a sunny afternoon, June 22, 2008, a 48-year-old San Franciso man was driving back home from a family gathering in Fairfield. With him in his Honda were his three sons, Michael and Matthew and one whose name is not available because the district attorney’s office says he’s in a witness protection program.

A car pulled up alongside the Honda and, according to witnesses, the driver, one Edwin Ramos, opened fire with a chrome handgun. Tony Bologna and sons Matthew and Michael were shot dead.

According to prosecutors, Ramos mistakenly thought at least one of the Bologna sons was a rival gang member. For its part, the defense claims that the ‘real’ shooter was Wilfredo ‘Flaco’ Reyesruano, a leader of a gang faction known as MS-13, who has now disappeared, and that Ramos was “very much giving a friend a ride and that individual completely unexpectedly opened fire.” Very much, huh? Completely? Here’s someone with a future as a Presidential press secretary.

Ramos goes to trial this week in San Francisco. Since I don’t know whether the eyewitnesses, including the surviving Bologna son, are right about who pulled the trigger, I don’t know what degree of culpability I’d assign to this defendant. On the other hand, I’ve got a few observations.

The shooting has attracted greater than the usual for a gang-related murder for a couple of reasons. One, Ramos was an illegal alien. Two, Ramos had been busted previously for violent crimes and cut loose, without immigration authorities being notified.

Under rules promulgated by the San Francisco County board of supervisors, which barred city officials from cooperating with deportations, the Juvenile Probation Department had ordered employees not to report minors to I.C.E. Thus Ramos, who with two other MS-13 members beat up a man on a Muni bus in 2003, and who in April 2004, just days after being released from a shelter to his mother’s custody, assaulted a pregnant woman and her brother, was never reported to immigration.

The Ramos case spurred city authorities to modify the rules, and officials are now able to ‘use their discretion’, but the problems it underscores have not been addressed and nobody in politics seems interested in doing so.

There are immigrant gangs in San Francisco, Oakland, and other Bay Area cities. Some of the members are in their early teens. They try to shoot each other, fighting for control over drugs, or for turf or pride. Their accuracy is lousy. Every week some bystander gets blown away. In Oakland there have been several recent shootings which killed small children.

There are issues here. One is immigration, specifically illegal immigration. Another is criminal law, especially as it pertains to juveniles. A third is national politics, trade policy, and NAFTA, and what it’s doing to the economies of Mexico and the United States.

When I was in law school, I was very impressed with a book on the insanity defense written by one Thomas Szasz. It was called ‘The Myth of Mental Illness.’ I did not realize at the time that Mr. Szasz was a libertarian crazy. Now I regard him simply as a genius.

The point as it applied to criminal law was this: there is no dividing line. Everyone’s got a reason, or at least some reason may be ascribed to a given criminal action. Defense lawyers, of course, have a job to do. They sometimes try to do that job by explaining that a client was not wholly responsible for his or her acts under the law. Why not? Because he or she was mentally whacked out at the time. A secondary line is that due to a person’s childhood experiences he or she is not entirely to blame.

I buy these arguments, of course, but they are also beside the point. I don’t know anything about Ramos’ background, history, upbringing, formative experiences. And for the purposes of the criminal justice system, I don’t care.

In my justice system, if you are beating people up on a bus, you’re going to the slammer. If you’re part of a gang and in the country illegally, you’re leaving. I fully appreciate that NAFTA has fucked over Mexico and the working people of the U.S., and I think immigration policies are pretty bad, and that’s all beside the point.

The pregnant woman you beat up four days after the system released you to the custody of your mother did not deserve to be beaten because you’ve had a hard life.

I agree with people like my daughter who argue that the culture has created these violent thugs and that the culture needs work, but I don’t buy that these facts let anybody off the hook for their behavior. As Szasz might say, everybody’s got a reason.

By the way, I don’t apply these rules only to immigrants. They apply to everybody. One cause for half the country carrying firearms around is that the system keeps slapping wrists until somebody’s dead. I don’t think it takes a genius to figure out that a kid who’s beating people up as part of a gang is going to keep right on doing it until he is locked up permanently or shot by a cop.

As one friend of mine said, reacting to the Szasz video, brain chemistry is an interesting thing. I have other friends who are child therapists and still others who have children diagnosed with various of the ‘new’ illnesses Szasz talks about and have used modern psychopharmacology to help them lead reasonably functional lives.

I’m not for or against. I’m just asking the question because it interests me.

But regardless of the question or the answers any of us have, how sane is it to let people such as Ramos back on the street when it’s plain as day what’s going to happen next?

I have not always felt thus. I recall quite well arguing, years ago and with great passion and excessive heat, that until society quit screwing people up we had no business throwing their asses in the can. We made them, I said, and if we were going to punish someone for their transgressions we might start with ourselves.

Guilt. A useful rhetorical tool. But I no longer buy it. Those are real children being shot with stray bullets in Oakland. Tony Bologna was only 48 years old and probably had a few plans left in his life. His kids also didn’t do anything to Edwin Ramos.

I’m not talking about targeting people for minor offenses, but violent crimes are not minor. Assault and battery is not minor, and I don’t care how many times a day some jaded Superior Court judge or raw deputy prosecutor sees it, the perps go to jail for a nice long stretch or, if they’re here illegally, back to their country of origin.

This isn’t the wild west and even an old radical like me can get tired of this shit.

It’s another Presidential election season and the Republicans are already playing in the primaries. Because electronic vote theft can be done anywhere the votes are cast or counted, from individual machines to central tabulators, and there is no way to make sure the numbers are honest, we are witnessing not only a crazy GOP circus but one which may in fact be subject to flat-out fraud. We just don’t know. We’ve already seen instances where the announced vote totals seem peculiar in light of available polls.

And rigging is not limited to Presidential contests. Last year, in a story that should have blown the lid off this scandal but didn’t, it was revealed that voting machinery in Pennsylvania has almost certainly been cooked.

In Venango County, where touch-screen ES&S iVotronic machines are used exclusively, an independent forensic investigation produced strong evidence of wholesale fraud –– before the company threatened to sue the auditors and the local Democrats forced the investigation to shut down.

According to the initial report by auditors, someone used a computer that was not part of the county’s election network to remotely access the central computer, illegally, and “on multiple occasions.”

Ordinarily, the County Commissioners act as the elections board, however when the commissioners themselves are up for election, an interim board is appointed to serve that function. That’s when the trouble started. The interim Board commissioned the audit, which began late in September, after months of delaying tactics by the incumbent Commissioners, after it heard extensive testimony concerning anomalies in the May, 2011, primary.

The audit was undertaken by David Eckhardt and Gregory Kesden, computer science professors at Carnegie Mellon, without pay. They worked with a hard drive clone of the ES&S central tabulating computer As soon as the first report was issued, Oliver Lobaugh, the local judge who had appointed the interim Board, promptly fired them.

The Interim board, meanwhile, announced that the county’s November elections would be held using an optically-scanned paper ballot system from the same company. Although using an ES&S system, albeit different, in the election, the Board received letters from the company threatening a lawsuit if the results of their investigation were made public.

And that’s where the matter seemed to end. The Interim Board, removed from office, was replaced by the original Commissioners who showed no inclination to poke around any further. The rest of the auditors’ findings would never see the light of day. Except something happened.

Thank God for the electric age. It’s getting harder and harder to suppress unwelcome information because all that has to happen is for someone, anyone, to leak it to someone else and it’s all over. In the case of Venango County, someone leaked a copy of the auditors’ documents to Brad Friedman of the Brad Blog.

From Brad Blog:

Among those findings: details on unexplained, out-of-sequence activity log entries in the computer tabulation system, indications that the system was mounted several times with a "USB 'flash drive'" device, and, perhaps most troubling, evidence that the system was repeatedly accessed by an unidentified remote computer, for lengthy periods of time, on "multiple occasions."

How do you like it so far?

The initial inquiry had been prompted by some very odd results in 2008, when the machines had been showing a very large number of what are termed ‘undervotes.’ This is the phenomenon where given the total voters who cast votes a high percentage seems not to have voted on the top of the ballot contest. It’s an indication of fraud.

According to Craig Admas, a Republican who had been director of the Board of Elections at the times, told Friedman, "And then there were candidates for positions in the county and they had zero votes, but there was like 250 or 260 undervotes... (I)t is not normal," Adams said, describing the anomaly as "a red flag." When pressed to explain why he believed the the County Commissioners and their legal representatives had been working so hard for months to keep the audit from happening, Adams told us bluntly: "They know there's something wrong."

The ES&S machines used in 50 counties in Pennsylvania will be used in 12 states in the 2012 general election. As Friedman notes, roughly one-third of all the voters in the country live in precincts where they will be forced to use some form of touch screen system. This means that about 30% of the voters will cast votes which cannot be verified.

In Venango, the ousted Board tried to force reinstatement by going to court. Exhibit A in its motion, was the analysis by Eckhardt, which included these findings:

• It seems likely that the computer experienced a transient hardware failure in April.
• The computer appears to have been connected via a network which was also connected to a machine which has at other times been connected to a different network.
• It appears that remote-access software was installed on the computer after it was purchased. This software appears to have been used at least once for a non-trivial amount of time.
• Various remote-access settings are configured in a way that is probably unwise.
• We observed an anomaly related to a "log file" obtained from Unity.
• In the case of two precincts, anomalies were observed that, at present, suggest reduced attestation of certain votes. Further investigation is warranted in these cases.

Don’t worry, dear reader, that is not a window carelessly left open in another room, it is your blood running cold. In the almost clinical language of a scientist, Eckhardt, who also explained to the judge that a complete audit could not be performed since ES&E will not reveal source codes, claiming they are ‘proprietary,’ and because the company would not turn over other information crucial to a full inquiry.

Eckhardt writes:

Based on information from my colleague Gregory Kesden, a remote-access application was probably installed on November 2, 2009. Based on information from the Windows operating system’s event log, this program was used on multiple occasions. The most recent significant usage is probably 80 minutes on November 1, 2010. Based on observing the behavior of the system while it is running, that application is configured to launch when the system boots. Given the information readily available to us, it is not possible to determine which other system accessed this system...

The system log file, which produces a chronology of every action performed in the system, contained a bizarre anomaly. Apparently, the system was remote-accessed with six notations shortly after midnight on July 9, 2009, but the events were listed out of order, tucked between May 13th and May 16th. Eckhardt said it was impossible to tell why this took place, and pointed out that the peculiar data was "Just one example of the hidden problems...in thousands of pages of data. There is just too much unpublished data, too complicated to study correctly without months and teams of forensics specialists studying different areas, and far too much that the companies do not allow anyone to study or test in any brand of electronic voting machines, not just those in our county.

"Many steps of the operation of iVotronic voting terminals are infeasible to audit by a third party after the fact. Some can be investigated by individuals with access to the proprietary program source code ... In the past, such investigations have required a large staff and multiple months, suggesting they are frequently not practical to carry out between an election with surprising results and when that election must be certified."

Basically, it can’t be done. If you’re using one of these electronic systems with no paper trail, anyone who wants to can cook it.

Need further proof, take a look at South Carolina, the Democratic primary for Senator in 2010. Two candidates. One, a former circuit court judge and state legislator, Vic Rawl. The other, a complete unknown named Alvin Greene, who had spent no money and done no campaigning. Greene was announced as the winner by the same ES&S touch screen system used in Venango. Nobody believed it, yet Rawl’s challenge could not be successful because his team of forensic analysts were not allowed access to the voting systems, memory cards, tabulator, or other "proprietary" property of ES&S.

We are presently in a position where Americans can’t trust our own electoral system because the votes are, in effect, counted by private companies with their own agendas, and there is no way to properly check the results. There never will be.

Once there was a paper ballot system in America. Elections were still rigged, of course, but you had a fighting chance. In Texas, for example, stories are still told of the rise of Lyndon Baines Johnson and the disappearance and reappearance of one particular box of ballots. In Illinois, downstate Republicans would delay reporting the results as long as possible, while Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley would wait them out, waiting to learn how many votes he had to invent to overcome the downstate GOP lead.

Now, however, we have cyber theft, untraceable felonies, stolen elections, results no one can credit. On the evidence, it looks as though some Democrats have decided they’d rather out-cheat the Republicans than try to reverse the problem. I watch the ‘returns’ in the primaries and don’t have any way to be sure the vote’s being honestly counted. Neither do you.

When a spineless John Kerry backed off challenging the 2004 reported result, fearing a ‘constitutional crisis,’ he actually insured that America would get one.

Michael Connell, the man who was the IT guru for Karl Rove and the Bush family, gave sworn testimony in a civil suit brought in Ohio to try to force some truth into the public eye. In sworn testimony, he told the court that Ohio’s vote in 2004 was electronically transferred by a company he owned, GovTech, to a server in Chattanooga, Tennessee, owned by SmarTech, and that’s where the Ohio vote was cooked. Ohio was one of the seven states whose announced vote totals were wildly skewed from the exit polls in favor of Bush.

Shortly after giving this testimony, Connell died in the crash of a small plane.

In the same trial, an IT security expert, Stephen Spoonamore, who was acquainted with Connell and others involved, said that the SmarTech system was not a ‘mirror’ –– a system designed to protect and replicate the results elsewhere if a main computer configuration fails –– but a ‘man in the middle’ –– a system designed to give access to someone who wanted to change the data and cover it up. Spoonamore said that the system could specifically alter results using the bypass techniques Connell had developed for the web hosting function.

Spoonamore had been part of the Ohio election monitoring operation. When he saw how the Ohio results were being sent to Tennessee, he complained to Ohio’s Secretary of State –– and was promptly relieved of his duties and sent home. In a sworn affidavit he later provided to the Ohio court, Spoonamore wrote:

"The SmarTech system was set up precisely as a King Pin computer used in criminal acts against banking or credit card processes and had the needed level of access to both county tabulators and Secretary of State computers to allow whoever was running SmarTech computers to decide the output of the county tabulators under its control.... the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers."

It gets worse. Connell told of a web site called gwb43, which was live out of the White House and tied directly to the SmarTech Chattanooga server stacks. The transfer of the vote count to SmarTech has never been explained, and the only conceivable legitimate reason would or could have been in the event that there had been a complete failure in Ohio’s system. Connell swore that this did not happen. It was not a “fail-over” situation, he said.

In 2004, the three electronic polling companies whose machines were used throughout the country were Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia. Although Diebold has since changed its name, the same three continue to be the source for these machines to the present day.

The largest investors in each company were and are government defense contractors, Northrup-Grumman, Accenture, Electronic Data Systems, and Lockheed-Martin. Diebold hired Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of San Diego to develop the software security in their voting machines. Many of the officials on SAIC's board are former members of either the Pentagon or the CIA. They include: Army General Wayne Downing, formerly on the National Security Council, Bobby Ray Inman, former CIA Director, Retired Admiral William Owens, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Robert Gates, another former director of the CIA. It would be interesting to inquire what deep interest in control of the machines and their software would stir the defense and intelligence industries.

I hope I’m not out of line in asking, but can someone explain how this military and intelligence involvement in running America’s vote is somehow devoid of any interest in the results?

The only way a post-election electronic audit can be effective is if the auditors have access to the source code. Guess what? The companies have refused to divulge it, and the courts have backed them up. The source code, you see, is ‘proprietary information’ and thus protected from disclosure.

The jeopardy to free elections this creates ought to be obvious even to a fool. Private corporations run the elections and the government is not permitted to examine how this is done. We are therefore put in the position of trusting corporations –– owned largely by the military and secret police –– to accurately record and count the votes, with no paper trail and no ability to know who really wins and loses.

Connell and Spoonamore are not the only people to blow the whistle on the electronic fraud. In Florida, an IT expert named Clinton Curtis, came forward to say that he was asked by the Republican speaker of the Florida House, Tom Feeney, to create a code to electronically flip votes. It was undetectable, Curtis said, and “simple” to do.

The accused, who has now won election to the House of Representatives, claimed that he was only trying to find out how it might be done in order to guard the process against Democratic hackers. An independent journalist who had interviewed the expert and others from the involved companies, and who told friends he expected to ‘blow the case wide open,’ was found dead in a motel room of a gunshot wound to the head. His notes were never found. His death was ruled a suicide.

A Diebold contractor, Chris Hood, claims that the President of the company, Bobby Rossovich, personally instructed him to install a ‘patch’ to ‘fix the clock’ on 56 Diebold machines prior to the primary election in Georgia in 2002. He says others were likewise given patches to be installed in other machines. But the installation didn’t fix any clocks, Hood says. He also tells of wholesale ‘errors’ in 2002 and 2004 Maryland, where he witnessed the erasure of nearly 2,000 cards in Baltimore County. Sometimes, he says, if a memory card is erased, the votes can be restored from the memory chip inside the touch screen –– but not always. Often “you’re left with a blank card.”

One way an election can be easily stolen was demonstrated in a project undertaken at Princeton University using a Diebold Accuvote TS machine, the same one used in several states. Students demonstrated how anyone who can write a few lines of code and has access to a machine can fix the results in about 10 seconds.

Like Curtis, the Princeton crew explained that the rigging could be done in such as way as to avoid detection. A machine, switched on for election day, would be ‘tested’ by a precinct worker who triggers simple logic and accuracy functions, casting simulated ‘votes’ and then counting and matching the outcome. The machine, however, knows this is not a real election and does not trip the virus. Only when the worker signals the machine to start the election does the virus assert control. When the election is over, the memory card removed will show the phony totals and the vote-stealing software will delete itself. No evidence of hijacking remains.

Not only that, the viruses can spread from one machine to many. Anytime a memory card is inserted, the infected machine will copy the virus to it. According to the Princeton researchers, so long as a machine is infected well in advance of an election, it’s virtually certain that the virus will get to a lot of others.

In the 2008 election, eight states used the specific machine from Diebold which the Princeton experimenters were able to completely discredit. Other states used similarly flawed electronic machines.

Okay, friends and loyal readers, time for another postcard from Crazytown.

I realize that for some of you, just about every column is from Crazytown so what’s the difference. A matter of degree, how about that?

Of course, crazy is a relative term, and not always negative. It’s also a measure of degrees from whatever’s popularly accepted as reality, and considering what most Americans think of as reality, just speaking the truth is an act of madness.

I’ve mentioned the subject before but it’s been awhile. In the last presidential campaign year, 2008, I wrote about something deeply dangerous which had occurred in the 2004 election, namely, the electronic theft of the presidency.

The reaction among readers was pretty much what I expected. Most who bothered to write expressed the view that I had taken up residence in cloud cuckooland. That there was –– and remains –– essentially no doubt that the Bush ‘win’ over Kerry was quite literally rigged electronically is beside the point. Denial is not just a conceit of the right wing religious nuts but of anyone whose world view is potentially disrupted by fact.

Fear of having your beliefs thrown into chaos is a powerful inducement. Whether it’s a faith in the literal truth of the bible or faith that there are limits beyond which people will not go in a ‘democracy’, the difficulty is the same.

My sense of what had taken place on election night, 2004, was based specifically on a couple of things which I knew, from a lot of years in the political life, had ineluctable meanings. This was before learning of the various dirty tricks the Republicans pulled which deprived huge numbers of eligible voters of their rights.

First, there were enormous turnouts, some in immense proportions even in driving rainstorms. The lines at polling places early in the morning and the numbers in black and student precincts across America were indicative of a strong pro-Kerry vote.

This, while a strong indication, is not necessarily dispositive. It’s based on people’s observations and on reports from the field. A candidate has very particular reports because he or she has reliable people in key precincts weighing the situation and because get-out-the-vote campaigns are based on cross-checking precinct lists with voting.

The second thing, however, was something which anyone familiar with politics knew was a certainty.

The practice of exit polling has evolved over the years to become the single most useful tool to guard against election fraud everywhere in the world. That’s because with a decent methodology it’s possible to nail the exact vote totals with no more than a 1.5% deviation from the announced results. In fact, the science had gotten so good that even a one percent difference was surprising.

In 2004, as the exit polls came in, it was obvious that Kerry had beaten Bush in a landslide. Key state after state was falling into the Democratic column. The mass media knew what it meant, as did the politicians. In the White House, Bush aide Karen Hughes was told by the President that it was all over and she ought to help prepare his concession speech.

But then something strange happened. Actual vote totals were being reported which varied considerably from the exit polls, not in all instances but in 7 states. In 43, the exit poll numbers and the reported vote was identical, no more than a 1.5% difference and often no difference at all. But in the chosen 7, there was a swing of between 7-8% in each case, and in each case from Kerry to Bush. It had the effect of changing the result in six of the seven states, and throwing the election to Bush.

I will never forget watching this happen on the television broadcasts and telling anyone who would listen that something was wrong. What we were seeing was not possible. The difference was between a three million vote Bush victory and a five million vote Kerry landslide. It is essentially inconceivable that eight million votes could have been shifted by an error in methodology, especially since it basically occurred in just 7 states. It amounts to a 5% shift, which is statistically impossible.

Kerry, of course, knew perfectly well that the election had been stolen. He decided not to contest it. That night, according to pretty reliable sources, there was a furious argument between Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, who demanded that the matter be exposed.

A lot of people noticed what I’d noticed. All across the country there were public meetings where computer experts of various capabilities demonstrated how easy it was to hack one of the electronic voting systems. A college professor who was a statistician expressed his opinion that for the actual vote to deviate from the exit polls in the same direction in six states had a likelihood of about a hundred million to one.

I didn’t know anything about computers but I attended several public demonstrations and read some articles. There were differences of opinion, but it seemed to me that the probability that the central tabulators in these seven states –– each of which was an electronic count state, by the way, with no paper trail –– had been hacked was quite real.

For some time, there was a strong public interest in getting back to paper ballots which could at least be counted and verified, but that has largely faded. Even as the 2008 election arrived, concern about electronic fixes revolved around the mobilization by the Obama forces of inspectors and lawyers in as many places as possible. My own opinion was that the Obama people, knowing that the result in 2004 had been cooked, purposely ran a nontraditional race, contesting the electoral votes in a lot of traditional Republican states to force McCain’s people into a difficult situation if they had electronica on their minds.

There were no exit polls. The media, with their usual courage and initiative, figured out that if there was going to be another theft they didn’t want to know about it, and that took care of that. Obama, as we know, scored a landslide. Subsequent analysis –– which would take too long to get into here, but which I absolutely credit –– seemed to show that at least five million votes were hacked, but it simply wasn’t enough. Obama’s true margin was probably that much greater.

I am referring not to garden-variety screw ups which led one machine to run backwards, or to blatant thievery –– in one Ohio precinct, McCain got more votes than there were registered voters –– but two other types of rigging. One, systematic vote flipping, is were a machine is programmed to ‘flip’ every third, or fourth, or tenth, or whatever, vote from a given candidate to his or her opponent.

Vote flipping in 2008 took place most obviously on touch screen systems manufactured by Diebold and ES&E, and mirrored what happened on a massive scale in 2004, where votes for Kerry were registered as votes for George Bush. While some voters caught the error, including Oprah Winfrey, who talked about it on her show the next day, many others obviously didn’t; how many of these there were, and the electoral effect of it is unknown, but it is striking that ALL such reports are of votes being changed from Obama to McCain and none the other way around.

You’d have to be daft to ascribe this phenomenon to accident or errors in calibration. In fact, some experts believe that the ‘flipping’ is being done not just to skew the vote but, when noticed, as of course it is, it will justify bringing in a ‘technician’ to ‘re-calibrate’ the machines. There is an opinion that electronic rigging may take place during the ‘re-calibration.’

But the biggest problem, the one which opens the door to the prospect of wholesale election theft, is the possibility that the vote totals themselves are changed by electronic hacking into the central computers. This is done by people who have access to the source codes and to ‘backdoor’ entries hidden by programmers. I have seen actual demonstrations of this process by experts on more than one occasion and have read the technical explanations elsewhere.

In the aftermath of 2004, there were leaks, disclosures, and confessions. It is hard to believe, at least for me, but although there is quite astonishing evidence in plain view, with actual participants describing how they had done what they’d done, the major parties are together in ignoring it and the mainstream media, although it has splashed a few stories on the news, has been largely silent as well.

It goes without saying, or should go without saying, that if America’s voting machines can and are being tampered with and elections stolen, we have a monumental crisis.

The documentation is extensive but you can locate a lot of it elsewhere and probably don‘t want to read another one of those 10,000 word essays I occasionally unleash on the unsuspecting.

In Part 2, I’ll confine myself to a few items which have interested me especially.

Latest WikiLeaks revelation: the United States is applying pressure and threatening “military-style” trade wars against the countries of western Europe in an effort to force them to accept GMO crops from Monsanto.

If you have followed any of the controversy over GMO and Monsanto, you know that the corporation is one of the creepiest criminal operations on the planet, forcing its seeds on unwilling independent farmers, destroying small farms, poisoning organic agriculture, and suing anybody in its way. You may also know that its former chief lobbyist is presently a major player in the Obama administration.

Now the Obama administration is making an offer they can’t refuse to America’s ‘friends’ because Europe doesn’t like GMO crops, doesn’t like Monsanto, and hasn’t been corrupted like the United States. Most Europeans prefer not to be sickened by the frankenfood Americans evidently don’t mind wolfing down. That is not acceptable.

My facebook suggestion that people like: the President ought to wear corporate patches on his suit like a NASCAR driver. ‘Monsanto.’ “General Electric’. ‘Goldman Sachs’.

You know what amazes me? The internet posters who acknowledge that the country’s in bad shape but give Obama a pass, blaming everything on others, often ending their comments with an all upper case admonition: NEVER VOTE REPUBLICAN. Blows my mind. It’s as though the policies actually followed by the Obama regime don’t register in their brain pans.

For some reason, perhaps a deep-seated pain that won’t go away, these apologists think that Obama’s really a good and decent man whose true intentions have been thwarted at every turn by the obstructionists in Congress. Many also seem to believe that criticism of the President is due to his race.

Bulletin to the Democratic Party: that’s what the G.O.P. said about opposition to the appointment of Clarence Thomas. Think these are different situations? Well, both Thomas and Obama share the same ideas about the constitution, which is that it doesn’t mean shit if it interferes with the government’s need to incarcerate, torture, or kill people.

Second bulletin to the Democratic Party: the same old game is not going to work this time. I say this having just force-fed myself the latest fund raising pitch which arrived in my mailbox today, this one over the signature of John Kerry, which proclaims what an emergency we’re facing, what with the Democrats’ “firewall” eroding in the Senate.

Kerry’s four-page plea is a sensational example, though he doesn’t realize it, of exactly why the Democratic Party is increasingly regarded as phony, crapped-out, and untrustworthy. Check out this portion:

“It’s up to us. And if you’re like me –– frustrated with the GOP’s efforts to paralyze our government and sabotage our recovery –– know this: We don’t have long to act.

“Democrats have fought back against Republican efforts to cut off unemployment benefits for struggling workers, demanded that billionaires and big corporations pay their fair share... stopped a Tea Party budget that would have slashed critical services and ended Medicare as we know it, and protected Social Security...”

First, let’s clear away some deadwood. John, I’m not like you. I didn’t marry into the Heinz canned food fortune. My income has dropped along with many others’ but I’m lucky enough to be able to pay my bills, barely, so far. Second, I notice that you’re not leading off with any accomplishments. I mean, three years into the Change We Can Believe In and what we get is you kept the Republicans from paralyzing the government and taking pieces out of Social Security?

See, you people walked into office on the crest of a huge wave of popular support, an electoral and numerical landslide, good majorities in both houses, and an America sick as hell of eight years of misery under George Bush. That is an opportunity which rarely comes along in American politics, as you should know.

As to the particulars, there are the things you mention: demanded that billionaires and big corporations pay their fair share... That was some fierce demand. As I recall, the only thing Obama had to do to bring this closer to reality was –– nothing. That’s right, had he done nothing at all, the Bush tax cuts for billionaires would have expired, saving enough money to pay for universal, single-payer health care for everybody.

And, as to any threat to end Medicare or cut Social Security, it was Obama who raised the possibility that these programs might have to “share the pain” in the general ‘belt-tightening.’

And speaking of unemployment, I see where the government is pleased with the latest tally, a rate of not much over 8.5%, an improvement over the month before. Thing is, John, the government’s numbers are lies. You see, the way we used to figure unemployment is not how we figure it today. We no longer count people who have been out of work for more than four weeks. We also don’t count people working part time who want to work full time. We don’t count the people who have just given up, as many have. If we counted the numbers the way they were counted during the first Great Depression, it would be closer to 20%. That’s what it really is, John, although people like you wouldn’t have any idea about it.

You see, John, when the people feel a lot worse than the government is telling them they ought to feel, you’ve got a problem.

From the letter:

“Imagine: a future in which middle class families bear the burden of paying down years of budget deficits –– while Wall Street bankers aren’t held accountable for anything at all.”

Tell me again, how’s this different from today? You’re not going to tell me that Obama and his party, stuffed with millions of dollars in payoffs, are really holding the crooks “accountable” for anything, are you? Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, heroes of the working class, with an Economic Recovery Board headed by the CEO of General Electric, which outsourced jobs and, despite a profit of $14 billion, paid zero taxes last year? Barack Obama and his cabinet, with Geithner and Bernanke and the same felons who ruined the lives of millions –– you want us to support you for re-election because God knows what might happen if the bad guys took power?

Four pages of the Democratic Party’s story heading into 2012 and all they could come up with by way of achievements? An end to ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ and a half-assed ‘health care’ law which forces the poor to buy overpriced insurance from crooked insurance companies. Whoo-ha! I’d be embarrassed, somebody asked me to write a letter like that.

One unintended moment of hilarity: “With all of the obstacles we are facing in Washington these days, sometimes even our successes don’t feel like enough. Believe me, there are days when I feel that way, too.” The successes not enough? With this administration’s proud record? Hard to believe.

Four pages of script and no mention of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, or Iran. No mention of the expanded Patriot Act, presidential authorization of death lists and assassinations, the NDAA passage and signing, the incarceration of Bradley Manning, the prosecution of medical marijuana outlets, the increased budget for nuclear weapons and remote-controlled killing machines. No mention of Guantanamo, the Bush tax cuts, a cabinet filled with corporate goons, the abandonment of labor unions. Nothing about GMO foods. Probably would’ve needed more pages and that would’ve jacked up the postage, which wouldn’t do, especially since there’s no indication this administration plans to save the postal service.

But look, the end of DADT! Thank goodness. Now homosexuals will be able to blow the brains out of people in faraway lands, just like straights. I’m so proud.

Want to know the really sick part? Romney would be worse. Marginally worse, I grant you, but almost certainly worse. The U.S. would not only be attacking the same countries, we’d be looking for some others to hit. The assassinations of Latin American nationalist leaders the U.S. media vilifies as ‘dictators’ would be approved –– you know, the democratically-elected Presidents of Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina...

It’s conceivable that Obama really won’t send troops or remote-control missiles to kill those leaders. No guarantees, of course. We did conspire with the Honduran military to overthrow their president because he was interfering with the interests of multinational corporations, so there’s certainly no guarantee that Obama won’t order or agree to the ‘removal’ of Hugo Chavez or Evo Morales.

I wish I could back Ron Paul. Regardless of some of the more lurid charges against him I think he’s a decent, honorable man. I’ve seen about two dozen YouTube videos and read quite a few articles, both pro and con, and I find myself in enthusiastic agreement with him on foreign policy, war, civil liberties and the constitution. He would repeal the Patriot Act and free Bradley Manning. He’d end the drug war, not only freeing hundreds of thousands of wrongly-imprisoned people, a large number of them black, but simultaneously removing the pretextual cover for U.S. antidemocratic military operations in Latin America. He correctly nails American sanctions against Iran as acts of war. He wants to prosecute the bankers and deep-six the federal reserve.

I agree with the guy on everything until he starts his economic theories, about which he is indeed crazy as a loon.

Thing is, however crazy Paul is on economic theory, he’s no crazier than the rest of those bozos on pretty much every issue there is. Santorum and Gingrich are probably certifiable. Romney is just a spineless phony. Obama is, well, a really slick public relations agent for the military and the multinationals who knows how to dress nicely.

I ain’t giving no bucks to John Kerry, the multimillionaire Senator who supports bailing out the wealthy and attacking the weak. Such is the party of my youth, gone to hell. It’s your club, John, you can cover the dues yourself.

The American system is a closed one. Democratic in theory, it’s a two-party monopoly in which the two parties conspire to prevent a third party from emerging. But something’s got to give. The fakery isn’t working anymore. I read yesterday that there is a prospective opening to head the World Bank and Obama’s expected to name the father of deregulation under Clinton, Lawrence Summers.

Kerry’s letter ends with the plea that I “rush (my) contribution back to the DSCC today...” I’m sending back the envelope but there will not be a check inside. Instead, I enclosed a brief explanation of why I will not vote for Barack Obama. I wanted to enclose a brick.

“If I sit silently, I have sinned.” Mohammad Mossadegh.

We need information, lots of it, in order to be properly armed against the onslaught of propaganda on Iran which the mass media and politicians of both parties are already spewing over the whole country. They’re greasing the skids for yet another war.

In the internet age, there’s really no excuse for buying policies built on lies. When Barack Obama and the rest of them feed us Purina and tell us to chow down, the excuses of a bygone era, that we didn’t know any better, will not serve us. Won’t serve our country, either.

We’re being hosed on Iran.

Let’s begin with a simple question. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. How much power does he have over Iranian foreign policy? Answer: none.

Surprised? Sure, you are. Because the mass media in America, along with its little friends on the right wing of the Israeli government, would like you to believe that this crackpot’s ranting constitutes a serious threat which requires, at a minimum, American economic sanctions, and at most the dropping of nuclear weapons on a largely defenseless people.

Since the Iranian political system puts foreign policy in the hands of the Supreme Leader and the Guardian Council, who have actually and consistently been quite conciliatory on the Israel situation, there’s really no basis for blowing the place up just because Ahmadinejad rattles sabers. It’s as though some other country decided to attack the United States because of some nitwittery out of the mouth of, say, Pat Robertson.

The fact is that Ahmadinejad says many of the things he says in order to shore up his domestic political support, which has been leaky, and he’s facing election in a couple of months. But in doing so, he’s handing the crazies in the U.S. the kind of rhetorical support they need to roll over common sense.

Iran, as you may know, once had a democracy. Its elected leader, Mohammad Mossadegh, was a progressive, west-leaning man prepared to liberalize the country. But he pissed-off the British government when he decided to reassert national control over Iran’s oil, which had been ripped off by the precursor to British Petroleum.

The British found friends inside the American CIA, but Harry Truman, then President, wouldn’t go along with a coup. No matter. Once he was out of office, the U.S. climbed on board with the Dulles brothers and the Eisenhower administration in 1953. We installed the Shah. He in turn, with help from the CIA and Mossad, created SAVAK, a secret police as feared as any, anywhere in the world.

For 25 years, the Shah ruled Iran and SAVAK tortured and killed anyone who raised objection. He flattered the U.S. with a ‘westernization’ program, including limited rights for women, and he bought our loyalty with oil deals that enriched him and his western friends. He also tried to wipe out Islam. The latter project did not turn out so well.

In 1979, there was an unstoppable popular uprising and the Shah, who Jimmy Carter had only a year earlier described as a stable leader in a sea of change, had to flee for his life. Iran asked the U.S. to extradite him, agreeing to a series of U.S. requests in exchange which would have normalized relations. The U.S. declined. Iranian radical students thereupon seized the U.S. embassy –– which Iranians knew was the same building from which the 1953 coup had been engineered –– and imprisoned 52 American diplomats and employees, and that was the end of Jimmy Carter.

In 1980, Iraq attacked Iran and Iran appealed to the United Nations for support under its Charter. The U.N., dominated by the U.S., which was still under the Carter administration, ignored the appeal. Although America nominally backed Saddam Hussein –– remember the great photo of Donald Rumsfeld shaking his hand –– it actually played both sides. Regional conflict has often worked to American advantage in supplying arms and in offering loans for ‘rebuilding’. The war lasted eight years, during which time Iraq used poison gas against Iran and against its own Kurdish population.

This is all necessary preamble for understanding why in the present day Iran doesn’t trust the United States.

The nuclear issue also has a history. In the late 1960s, the world’s ‘super powers’, notably the United States, produced a nuclear nonproliferation agreement, the NPT, to which Iran was a signatory, unlike some American allies such as Israel and Pakistan, for example.

The NPT was designed to reverse the course of nuclear proliferation, where countries possessing the bomb would phase out their arsenals and countries which had not yet obtained it would agree not to. Part of the treaty specified that nations could develop nuclear power for peaceful uses and that other nations would help them.

Oddly enough, while Iran has tried to follow the NPT, most countries, including the United States, haven’t, while non-signatories such as Israel, with more than 200 nuclear missiles, and Pakistan, with at least 60, are apparently free to keep what they’ve got and build more.

One of America’s featured complaints about Iran is the allegation that in refining nuclear fuel it is getting closer to being able to assemble a functioning weapon. This is ironic since Iran’s fellow signatories to the NPT deal, including Japan and dozens of others, are happily producing enriched uranium of weapons grade quality without anybody getting a wild hair up their rectum.

But the kicker, of course, is that Iran has bent over backward to comply with U.S. requests on the matter. In 2006, shortly after Ahmadinejad was elected, in an attempt to fix relations with the U.S., Iran offered a ‘Grand Bargain,’ offering to grant unlimited inspection of its facilities in exchange for an end to sanctions. Bush said no.

So when you see an American President claim that a given target country is not ‘cooperating’ with inspections or violating some U.N. rule, consider what’s really going on. It’s not about inspections, or even about nuclear development. It’s about public relations inside the U.S. so that the American people will swallow yet another ugly, murderous war.

Right now, Barack Obama is talking about his ‘concern’ that Iran plans to develop nuclear weapons. He bases this on a United Nations ‘report’ from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The fact is that this ‘report’ is a phony, cooked-up by the United States and drafted by its stooge, the new IAEA director, who the U.S. forced on the agency when the previous director, Mohamed El Baradei, left his post.

El Baradei, who had overseen the IAEA for twelve years, was quite outspoken on the matter of Iran and its nuclear research. Before leaving office he said that there was “no evidence at all” of either nuclear weapons capability or of undeclared facilities. Once he was gone, however, the United States used the identical documents earlier summoned to clear Iran to now condemn it.

There is no proof, but that has never stopped America before. Remember Condoleezza Rice and George Bush saying they didn’t want to wait for the “proof” of Iraq’s mythical WMDs to arrive “in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

When are we going to learn? When are we going to demand that our own country obey the law it expects everyone else to obey? The U.N. Charter, Chapter I, Article 2, prohibits “threats of war” and the “use of force” by one nation against another absent a direct attack or one which is clearly imminent. In its invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, its rocket attacks inside Pakistan, its overthrow of the Libyan government, and its threats against Iran, the U.S. is in violation of international law.

Iran’s military poses no threat to anyone, not to the U.S., and not to Israel, which recently took delivery of a fleet of long range bombers from America and made it clear they could be used against Iran.

But America poses a threat to everyone. A nation whose military budget exceeds the combined military spending of all other countries on earth, combined. A nation which attacks other nations without provocation, on obvious falsehoods, for reasons of geopolitics and the control of other nations’ resources.

More than a million people have died in Iraq as a result of U.S. sanctions and military invasion, according to several independent sources. That’s mass murder.

With Congress a pathetic shell of its original purpose and with a Supreme Court unlikely to intercede on foreign policy activities, even assassination and torture, and with a President whose war making already exceeds that of his sociopathic predecessor, it’s up to the American people to stop this madness.

Tell me it’s not true. The final day’s festivities at the Democratic National Convention next summer will be held in the Bank of America Stadium, a 74,000 seat venue which will enable more loyal and patriotic Americans to get a glimpse of the President.

Coincidentally, it will allow the Democrats to auction off the luxurious skyboxes to close friends. I suppose I’m just a cynic, but why not just hold the whole damned thing in a Bank of America board room and be done with it?

Bank of America, as you may recall, got $45 billion dollars in the government’s ‘bailout’, enabling it to prime the economy which, as it happens, it did not do. It did use the money to buy Treasury bonds, though, turning the bailout into an immense subsidy, and some of the spare change went to the purchase of smaller banking and investment enterprises.

That capitalism, wow, hard to fault a system which affords the super wealthy unlimited access to public funds.

The Democratic Party’s stadium announcement was coupled with a second one, perhaps even more revealing. Originally, the convention was to be held September 3rd through the 6th. National party conventions have always been four day affairs. But this time, September 3rd being Labor Day, the convention will not meet. Instead, party officials declared, the day will be for “celebrating the Carolinas, Virginia, and the South at Charlotte Motor Speedway.”

They really said that.

I’d always thought that, politically, Labor Day was a day for celebrating the working people of America, their unions, and the advances a free society had made in raising the standard of living of lower- and lower-middle class families. I must’ve been wrong.

Actually, the Democrats abandoned the working class around the time of Clinton. Not enough votes in it, not enough big money. Clinton ran to the bankers, deregulated the industry, pimped for NAFTA, and screwed the unions. Obama pays lip service but that’s all. Still, the idea that the Democratic Party plans to spend Labor Day at the car races tells us all we need to know about it.

The internet commentary on politics has a fair amount of admonitions to ‘NEVER VOTE REPUBLICAN’, as though that’s some magic elixir. Over the past year, this tag line has been appearing in fewer places and in more desperate appeals. It’s not surprising. The fig leaves are falling.

Bill Hicks had a wonderful bit about this. ‘I think the puppet on the right speaks for me. I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking.... Hey, wait a minute! It’s the same guy!”

On the net over the past twenty-four hours: pathetic, hopeful comments from some
‘liberal’ Democrats because Obama has decided against the proposed Keystone pipeline, a kind of, “See? McCain would’ve approved it.” Probably. Of course, the part of the deal they’re not mentioning is that the energy gang is already preparing its ‘alternative’ route, and Obama’s likely to sign off on that one.

The President’s message on Keystone was pathetic anyhow. He turned it down, he said, because given the deal Congress forced on him he had to decide before the environmental questions had all been answered. You know what a real President would have said about Keystone? How about: “Are you fucking crazy? Never.” That wouldn’t have required any lengthy inquiry.

I suppose it could’ve been worse. Had Bill Clinton been President, he’d have approved the deal in exchange for a seat on their board of directors.

I suspect I will not even watch the conventions on television. My threshold for abuse is considerably below what it once was.

I’ve actually been on a couple of convention floors, first in San Francisco in 1964, the Republican coronation of Barry Goldwater, where the skyboxes were not sold to corporate pricks but filled with the television and radio people. When Barry went over the top, delegates shook their fists at Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley behind what I hoped was bullet-proof glass. The second was in Chicago in ‘68.

Those were real conventions, where fixers and party faithful and thugs commingled, and there were deals getting made and broken around the edges and futures were being negotiated and pasts expunged. All gone now. We don’t have political conventions in America anymore. We have media spectaculars, American Idol for terminal pols, brought to you by the people who own your ass.

Bank of America Stadium. How perfect is that?

Three years after promising to end the war against Iraq, President Obama last month announced the withdrawal of the last American troops, technically pulling them out of the country and into Kuwait. Some have returned to the U.S. and others have been ‘redeployed.’

In a speech marking the occasion, the President offered himself congratulations and even alluded to an element of ‘success’ in the endeavor, a comment sending chills down the spine of anyone with a functioning brain.

This President has done many deeply crazy and dangerous things, but among the worst have been his maneuvers surrounding war and how they are now being waged by the United States.

In case you haven’t noticed, there has been a sustained push over the last thirty years to ‘privatize’ things in America and throughout western Europe. This trend has accelerated here under the last two Presidents.

Many of the functions long established as being within the proper purview of the government have been ‘reassigned’, quietly or otherwise, to private contractors. When there is public discussion –– increasingly missing lately –– the argument is generally that private oversight is more cost effective.

That’s not true, as it happens. Private operations of formerly public functions are far costlier. There is far more graft and corruption, far more system error and inefficiency. It should be obvious why this is so: private operations have to produce profit, and that is pretty much how they’re judged.

Schools are being privatized, both through government targeting –– the Bush regime and now Obama have avoided rebuilding the public school system in New Orleans, for example, purposely forcing people to send their children to private schools or none at all –– and through the punitive features of No Child Left Behind and Obama’s ‘Race To The Top,’ which is more like a race off a cliff.

Welfare operations have been privatized, with private companies ruling on eligibility (guess what? Fewer are eligible) and parceling out payments. Medicare collections have been privatized.

There is a strong move to privatize parks and national treasures, although substantial opposition has slowed this one.

All of these are ugly and rather stupid, and they cause no end of problems for anyone involved in the system, but they are nothing compared to two very scary privatization programs going on in America.

One is prisons. As I’ve written in other contexts, we’ve gone from five private prisons in 1985 to more than 270 twenty years later. When you privatize prisons, you sever the responsibility from government for housing and taking care of large numbers of people who have been deprived of their freedom by that government. In effect, you create a situation in which the system locks someone up and then abandons further supervisory responsibility to the private sector, which, guess what, is interested in profit. Because of this, we already have situations where inmates are barely fed subsistence, locked down most of the time because it’s easier and requires less active supervision, and treated like animals. Moreover, it creates a powerful lobbying operation because the more people arrested and incarcerated the greater the profit. That’s insane on its face. But we’ve done it and are still doing it.

The second is even worse.

As Obama proclaimed, he’s ‘withdrawn’ U.S. troops from Iraq. The catch is that they’re still there, only now they are ‘private’ troops, no longer under the control of the U.S. military and not under the jurisdiction of anybody as a practical matter.

There are in fact more than 260,000 private troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is more than the number of ground troops on both countries. The numbers, therefore, can be made to look as though the President is gradually reducing U.S. presence while the fact is the opposite.

And of course, that’s a quarter of a million heavily armed people, paid an average of about $120,000.00 per year, and literally out of control by any government. That means the United States is conducting corporate wars by proxy, at a very high expense because the U.S. is still paying the costs by way of Defense Department and CIA off-the-books expenditures.

Privatization, for whatever reason, is basically a mechanism to destroy liberty often couched in the terms of liberty. It is the chief flaw in the otherwise commendable Ron Paul candidacy, but it is a very dangerous one. Whenever these guys start talking about ‘free enterprise’ they are really talking about the guys with the bucks and the guns kicking shit out of everybody else. That’s how it works.

You cannot have a private prison system compatible with a democracy. You cannot run wars with private troops, accountable to private interests. You will lose your democracy, no question about it.

Look at what’s going on inside the U.S. A system of no-charge, no-trial incarceration of ‘enemy combatants’ in foreign territory, has been expanded by both parties and signed by the President to a system permitting kidnapping of Americans in America by the military, without warrants, charges, or court hearings, and involving permanent confinement. What do you call that if not the basis for a police state? What happens when the private soldiers hired by Xe, formerly Blackwater, begin to operate inside the U.S.?

Public institutions, however imperfect or infested with corruption, at least contain the mechanisms for correction. They offer a democratic model. Privatizing government will mean that the government will directly serve its corporate masters. True, this is how it is now, to some degree. But where these people are trying to take us is all the way there. That’s fascism.

In the not-too-distant past, 11:30 at night, I’d be firing up a bowl of cannabis to assist me in, as Bill Hicks might say, squeegying my third eye, not to mention to honor the subject of my treatise, which is the most significant illegal agricultural product in the world.

Marijuana is illegal. If you learn anything about it, it becomes apparent that making pot illegal is about as sensible as making penicillin illegal, and probably has worse consequences.

I can’t smoke it anymore due to an almost lifelong intake of tobacco at the rate of about a pack a day. This resulted in a condition which makes inhaling smoke of any kind a less than enjoyable experience. Too bad.

My lungs are no longer in prime condition, a circumstance due entirely to a legal product, tobacco. My use of marijuana, despite what the ignorant say, had exactly NO negative effects on my lungs. Oddly enough, recent government-funded studies prove that inhaling marijuana smoke does not contribute at all to emphysema or COPD, and not a single case of lung cancer has been traced to pot, not one. I’m sure that came as a nasty shock to the federales.

Last week, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported on the results of yet another study, this one funded by the (U.S.) National on Drug Abuse and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, over a period of twenty years, which showed that using marijuana, up to 365 joints or pipe bowls per year, actually improved lung function, a finding which sure surprised the study’s funding agencies.

Dr. Donald Tashkin, a marijuana researcher at UCLA who was not a part of the study, said that smoking pot does not put users at risk for COPD, and that “people who are using marijuana for medicinal purposes or recreationally at least should be reassured that they’re not harming their lungs in this way.”

It turns out that virtually every negative claim about pot over the years is incorrect. Not only that, it turns out that pot is probably the most significant medicinal plant in the world.

Don’t listen to me, of course. My brain’s been addled by all of that reefer over the years. Ha! Surprise! Recent studies also show that it in fact measurably improves brain function and stimulates brain cells. Actually, my brain’s known that ever since that first joint back in 1966 (thanks, Brian).

Does a few other things as well. Ask Lester Grinspoon, professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School. Citing major studies, Grinspoon puts the data into perspective. Over 200 medical conditions respond favorably to marijuana. These include Alzeimer’s Disease, glaucoma, multiple sclerosis, wasting syndrome, anxiety, depression, arthritis, and multiple dystrophy. No other naturally-growing substance comes anywhere close to that.

Meanwhile, total yearly deaths in the U.S. from tobacco: 430,000. Total from alcohol: 85,000. Total from caffeine: 10,000. Total from aspirin: 7,500. Aspirin! Total from marijuana: 0. That’s right, none, nada, zilch, zero.

But the U.S, government considers it to be a Class I drug, which means that officially it has no medical value. Of course, the U.S. government has often proven itself to have no value whatever.

How is it possible that something so useful for human health and which carries no significant negative side effects –– unless you count euphoria –– can possibly be illegal? What the devil happened here?

Stick around. I’ve got a really ugly story to tell.

Pot was legal until 1937. This was lucky in many respects because the larger category, that of hemp, was practically a miracle plant. More than 5,000 textile products came from it, and it was actually, until 1883, the largest agricultural product in the world. In the last half of the 19th century, fully half of all medicines included cannabis.

The first law on the subject in America predated the Constitution and was actually an order to grow it. The first two copies of the Declaration of Independence were written on hemp paper, which is a fine thing because, unlike paper from trees, hemp paper does not yellow with age. Also, you don’t have to cut down forests to make it.

Hemp produces a durable, soft, long stem fiber which is stronger and lasts longer than cotton. Hemp seeds can be eaten too, and should be; they contain all essential amino acids. It is also usable as a biofuel, and since it grows nearly everywhere and is sensationally cheap, it would be a significant substitute for other energy sources currently threatening the survival of the planet (nuclear power) or is the subject of the U.S. government’s wars of empire (oil and natural gas).

Why was marijuana made illegal in the first place? Well, a fellow named Harry J. Anslinger convinced Congress that pot made people into dangerous animals. As evidence, he pointed out that it was popular among Negroes and Mexicans, who were notoriously violent. The music they listened to, also: promoted sexuality.

Anslinger was really only looking for a job for himself. And Congress, whose membership consisted of a great many ignorant and sexually insecure white males, passed a law which made it illegal to grow hemp or marijuana in any form without a government stamp –– which could not be obtained.

The situation remained that way until World War Two, when hemp’s excellent industrial properties were rediscovered for the war effort. But when the war ended, a 1948 hearing restored the prohibition. This time, Congress did not think smoking pot made one violent. To the contrary, they now thought it made people nonviolent, and that was considered to be even worse. Smoke weed and the Commies would take over.

In the 75 years since prohibition, there have been numerous studies showing pot didn’t hurt anybody. To the contrary, it seemed to have plenty of positive qualities. The LaGuardia Commission, chaired by the popular New York Mayor in the ‘forties, and the Shafer Commission, chaired by a Republican governor appointed by Richard Nixon in 1972, both concluded that pot should be legalized.

For his part, Nixon was not going to let that happen. He buried his own commission’s report, saying, as recorded on the Watergate tapes, “Every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish.” That would’ve been news to Shafer, but never mind.

One member of Nixon’s special anti-drug team, the agents he assembled to prosecute his ‘War On Drugs’, later revealed that the President had his own agenda. Nixon was convinced that the antiwar movement was being run by pot-heads and that most antiwar demonstrators smoked it. Bust them for drugs, he told his crew, and the antiwar movement would be crippled.

Marijuana is pretty close to a miracle drug and a miracle product. That’s why it’s illegal. That’s why close to a million arrests are made each year in the U.S. for pot, which is astounding. That’s why construction of private prisons is the fastest-growing industry in America. In 1985, there were five such prisons. By 2005, there were 270. Over that same period of time, spending on prisons increased from $923 million to $5.7 billion.

The rate of imprisonment in the United States is higher per capita than for any country in the world, higher even than the worst dictatorships. In 2005, the U.S. locked up 726 people for every 100,000. By contrast, Japan jailed 38 per 100,000.

The issue of whether in a democratic society there ought to even be private prisons can be taken up some other time. Any thoughtful person should realize that it’s idiotic and dangerous to turn incarceration over to private enterprise.

But the point is that marijuana and hemp –– the latter products can be imported but not grown and created domestically –– are illegal not for health or medical reasons but because they seriously threaten several of the most profitable businesses in America: the pharmaceutical industry, with yearly profits in excess of $300 billion. The legal drug racket depends on products which can be patented. Legalizing marijuana would mean anyone could grow their own. The use of pot for medicinal purposes would make a huge dent in the sales of experimental garbage big pharma is getting you to ingest via television ads and free samples to doctors who don’t always know any better.

Every year, medical prescriptions kill more than 100,000 Americans. But pot has never killed anyone.

Legal hemp, an enormous, cheap source of biofuel, would also reduce the power and profits of the petrochemical rackets. You can guess how excited Chevron would be to see pot legalized.

The mafia, of course, would also not be thrilled. Even though on some local levels, pot sales are mom-and-pop operations, the large-scale trafficking and importation business is organized and criminal. The profits are in the hundreds of billions. Needless to say, the mob is against legalization.

So, too, are the prison guard unions. Without pot arrests, we would not need new prisons; hell, we could close half of the ones we’ve got.

The top cops, mostly, are also against legalization. They are aware that their budgets are swollen with anti-pot money and they want to keep things that way. Cops on the beat know better, but they don’t feel able to say so.. Ask Norm Stamper, former Chief of Police in Seattle, 1994-2000. Stamper says this: “There are many, many police officers who believe it should be legalized, regulated and controlled. They see the hypocrisy between our existing laws regarding alcohol and marijuana in their daily life, shift after shift after shift, and they get it, but they don’t want to lose their jobs. they don’t want to lose that promotion to sergeant or that assignment to detectives, they want to be a chief some day and they don’t want to piss off people in power... “

Ah, yes, the people in power. That’s the story, as usual. Pot is illegal not because it’s harmful but because it’s good for you. But there’s too much money to be made in bad drugs you don’t need and which won’t cure you and maybe will even kill you. Don’t want to cut into the profits of the drug gang. Too much money to be made by the mob. Too much money to be made in prison construction and guards contracts and special helicopters and infrared night vision and spotter dogs. Too much money in oil, lumber, and every other industry threatened by hemp.

And meanwhile, the President, having promised to leave medical marijuana alone, is cranking up the machinery to prosecute providers, running people into courts and out of business, threatening landlords with confiscation, while sick people who really need this medicine are forced into street crime to obtain it. Thanks, Mr. President, you son of a bitch.

It’s not a small matter. It’s not just about getting high and having fun, which I realize is troublesome to many. It’s an important thing having to do with people’s health and well being. It has to do with using the resources of the earth in a way that benefits humankind and does little damage to the planet. It has to do with not jailing hundreds of thousands, of ruining people’s lives –– many of them minorities because the laws are enforced in a highly disproportionate manner –– and destroying families. It has to do with not feeding organized crime.

There’s probably another reason the powers that be don’t want to legalize pot. Apart from the lost profits for their crooked campaign contributors and billionaire friends, there’s also this: smoking marijuana tends to open up your mind. People who smoke weed are not so easily stuffed with lies and phony nonsense; they think. And we all know by now that if there’s anything that scares this government and its corporate sponsors, it’s people who can think.

“It’s called logic. It will not hurt you.”

Bill Hicks. I miss him. He’s been gone, what, almost twenty years and just about everything he said still rings true. He had the goods on U.S. foreign policy back then, telling a crowd at a Canadian comedy festival, about the war against Iraq conducted by George Herbert Walker Bush, “First, it must be said, there was no war. ‘How can you say that, Bill?’ Well, a war.... is when two armies are fighting.”

In those days it seemed surreal, listening to idiots like the first Bush President talk about lines in the sand and equally repellent nonsense and suckering Iraqis into going after Kuwait and then hitting them for it.

America lied just as much back then as it does now, and the media ignores it, preferring the admissions tickets to state dinners and the unattributed quotes and confidential, insider disclosures which disclose what the propagandists wish to disclose.

The first Gulf war was initiated when Saddam Hussein went into Kuwait, however he didn’t just invade. First, he consulted the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, asking her what would be the U.S. position were Iraq to do so, and she just slipped him the old wink and nod. We would have no difficulty with that, she said.

She may have meant it, she may not have. No matter. We wanted an excuse and we got one.

Same thing with Iran.

We’re going to hit Iran any time now, you can bet on that. We’ve been angling for it and we’ve been maneuvering like crazy, making sure that the U.N.’s documents out of the U.N.’s investigation –– which had for a decade discredited claims that Iran had developed or was developing nuclear weaponry –– would be reshuffled into something more convenient for the U.S. We’ve needed a reason we could play to the folks back home. The U.N. knows it’s a crock, but the U.S. dominates the U.N. Our allies in Europe know it’s wrong, but they need us to back up their austerity programs and the wholesale privatization being imposed thereby. The people of Iran know, of course, but we don’t exactly care what they think.

Not that it matters in the grand scheme of things, but would someone like to explain to me why it’s okay for the U.S. to develop thousands of nuclear weapons and station them everywhere in the world, and it’s okay for the French to have some, and Israel, and even Pakistan, but not Iran? Just as a matter of principle, you understand. What gives us the royal right to decide who gets them and who doesn’t?

Iran, you know, is the only viable alternative to Afghanistan for the natural gas pipeline the multinationals need. The Taliban are being tough in the negotiations. Taking Iran would, of course, obviate the need to deal with the Taliban.

And you probably thought it had something to do with freedom.

Actually, the United States has been making warlike statements by way of that Prince of Peace, Barack Obama, with ‘sanctions’ making it extremely difficult for Iran to sell its oil on the international market. By doing this, it makes it impossible for Iran to feed its 74 million people.

According to sources in Tehran, the sanctions are already having serious repercussions and producing genuine hardship on the street, where prices of imported goods have skyrocketed and the value of the rial has declined precipitously.

Part of the U.S. strategy is to try to stir an uprising among Iranians, who vote in two months in the first national election since 2009. Clearly, U.S. policy makers are hoping to stoke public anger against President Ahmadinejad. I guess Obama’s thinking that with a little luck the U.S. won’t have to murder him as we did Mohammad Mossadegh, another democractically-elected Prime Minister in Iran almost sixty years ago.

Back then it was about oil, as you might guess. Mossadegh was a very powerful, much-loved nationalist who believed that Iran’s natural resources should belong to Iran. The CIA explained why this was not to be.

Most Americans don't know shit about Mossadegh and don’t care, but the Iranians have not forgotten.

Most American also don’t care that the CIA assassinated an Iranian nuclear scientist by blowing up his car last week. Hillary Clinton, after making it clear that these sorts of accidents wouldn’t happen should Iran be more cooperative with the U.S., denied that we did it.

For its part, Iran is threatening to close off the Strait of Hormuz, thus interdicting the oil shipping of other countries including the U.S. The U.S. naturally cries foul because only we can do things like that. Never mind that such a move by Iran, if it could sustain it, would be entirely justified given what the U.S. and its putative allies are doing to Iran.

But Iran can’t sustain it. The U.S., with any support it thinks is necessary by way of the NATO fig leaf or by using French, British, and Israeli air strikes, could wipe out Iran and its people.

When I began writing these columns a few years ago, I chose ‘lookingglass’ as the name for the site because it seemed to me that as Americans we’d stepped right through it. Our government told us one thing, reality was often the opposite. This has become so reliable you can almost tell what’s going on in the world by inverting whatever the TV news reports or the President says.

The United States economic sanctions against Iran, including now the effective closing off of its right to sell its oil to the rest of the world, constitute an act of war. It’s similar to what America did to Iraq for ten years before Bush the Younger finished the job of decimating an entire population. The Iraq sanctions directly killed hundreds of thousands of people, something the pathetic U.S. media never bothered to mention but which the rest of the world knows all about.

Now we are trying the same thing on Iran. The march of the New World Order, justified by wholesale lies about ‘terrorism’ and propped up by the willing ignorance of the American people, continues.

When the U.S. hits Iran to ‘neutralize’ its ‘nuclear sites’, when it uses the extraordinary force of super weaponry, so-called ‘bunker buster’ bombs, similar in power to tactical nuclear weapons, it will be a matter of empire and conquest, nothing more honorable than that. This will not be a war. There will not really be two armies fighting. It will be one very powerful nation blowing up a weaker one. When Obama speaks on national television, he will be lying. More children will die.

Maybe he’ll earn another Nobel Peace Prize.

We’ve got a few Marines urinating on corpses of, presumably, people they just killed, and the State Department goes bananas, Hillary Clinton outraged and by God we’ll get to the bottom of this.

Marines have also, on the record, murdered people in their homes or walking along the street. One of the first of the WikiLeaks trove was a video of a U.S. helicopter crew blowing away people in the street, including bystanders who had come to their aid, and laughing about it, and Hillary wasn’t saying shit then.

We’re outraged that people we’ve trained to hate and kill exhibit some of that hatred on the people they’ve killed. What bloody hypocrites we are. Support our troops, my ass.

We’re outraged because it looks bad, not because it is bad. What we’re doing is horrendous, but since the media is completely embedded, which is to say whored out, and since we’re not allowed to see the dead bodies on the news for reasons of good taste, it doesn’t directly bother too many of us.

We’re troubled only by something shoved in our faces. Abu Ghraib, for example. So embarrassing. On the other hand, Fallujah, systematic murder of the innocents of an entire town, an atrocity which the United States has forgotten all about but which, I can guarantee, will never be forgotten by the people of Iraq. By the way, recent health data shows a sharp spike in birth defects among children born to women exposed to the white phosphorous America used in the operation. I never watch the idiot TV news, but I’ll bet anything that data did not show up anywhere, not even on Rachel Maddow.

We don’t learn much about massacres we commit because we don’t have an independent media in America. It’s a propaganda arm of the Pentagon and of multinational corporations.

Young Americans are surrounded by pseudo-patriotic horseshit, plied with violent video games, squeezed out of college admissions and priced out of education. That’s where the recruits come from.

The U.S. learned sixty years ago, in studies done on soldiers engaged in the Second World War and Korea, that fully half of the troops never fired their weapons. They didn’t want to. It’s hard to get some people to shoot other people. From this, America’s military realized that basic training would have to become psychological. Recruits would have to be convinced that ‘the enemy’ was less than human, they were things, and in the process our soldiers would be turned into potential monsters. Otherwise, the machine might break down.

Hatred is fed to these young men and women, hatred of other races and cultures and religions. This necessitates a culture of lies, incessant propaganda, the creation of killers who can murder without hesitation and without remorse.

Still, fully half of the troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder and other mental problems. There are very high rates of suicide, spousal abuse, alcoholism and drug addiction. Many have been driven so crazy they are unemployable and many are homeless. These may well be the most sensitive of our troops, those whose humanity had not been completely driven out of them.

This is how we ‘support our troops,’ by turning them into damaged people and then cutting them loose.

Yes, it’s pretty disgusting what those kids did, and in a sane world one would be legitimately outraged by it. But seeing the phony response of world class hypocrites such as Hillary Clinton turns my stomach. How dare they. This is the same Hillary Clinton caught chortling on camera when she learned that the President of Libya, an old man, had been sodomized and beaten to death by mercenaries America had trained and paid.

So I don’t want to hear any more ‘support our troops’ demagoguery from the likes of Clinton, Obama, or that entire roster of clowns and cretins running for President as Republicans. And I don’t want any more crocodile tears over the few instances of brutality which have somehow escaped the self-censorship of the media.

What we are doing can’t stand the light of day.

There are always signs visible in empires about to collapse. You can read them in the histories of Rome and in more recent vintages such as Britain and the Soviet Union. One of them is the escalating corruption in public services. It’s as though people in positions where crooked behavior may be exercised look around themselves and say, what the fuck, everybody else is doing it.

Ordinarily, a society harbors and even accommodates some level of thievery. In France, for example, it is considered normal for citizens to cheat on their income taxes. Of course, if everyone fails to pay, the system would go under, so for some reason, perhaps a sense of required equilibrium, the cheating is just enough to be a colorful cultural trait but not so much that the whole thing falls.

There are cultures in the Americas where it is customary to settle traffic infractions on the spot, sort of a travel tax that most people understand. Trouble only starts when either the police raise the stakes or amateurs begin stopping people at gunpoint.

In the U.S., corruption has always been a little strange anyhow. It’s been there but unacknowledged except in very particular environments. Thus, Tammany Hall was a symbol of Democratic Party graft and it was generally known that Richard J. Daley ran Chicago and Chicago’s ballot boxes, but if payoffs were prevalent at the national level they were not spoken of.

Republicans, meanwhile, having greater access to larger piles of loot, at least historically, simply bought politicians. The mafia bought the pols, the judges, and the cops. Edgar Hoover, now ‘humanized’ by DiCaprio for his homosexuality, latent or otherwise, let the mob off the hook while chasing fictitious ‘Reds’.

In short, there were rules and there were consequences for running outside them. But it has all changed. Perhaps it was the Savings & Loan deal, were crooks openly bilked the public, stole from the Treasury, and mostly got away with it. Several U.S. Senators, of both major parties, were bribed. John McCain, one of the bribees, not only remained in the Senate but got himself nominated for President.

Since the S&L story, it’s been open season. Few people have gone to prison; most of them skate. Some pay nominal fines, which is like hitting billionaires with tickets for overtime parking.

Still, these were largely private operations. The public got screwed, of course, which is the job of the public, but the system could pretend to be the arbiter, above it all, mostly clean and faintly reliable.

But in California, we’ve got a situation now and I think it is somewhat different than what we’ve seen in the past. The borders are falling, apparently, between public and private.

There is an entity called PG&E, which is in charge of supplying gas and electricity to pretty much everybody on the Northern California coast. It is a monopoly, but it is theoretically governed by the Public Utilities Commission. The P.U.C. sets the rates and otherwise oversees the company.

Naturally, the P.U.C. has been corrupted by PG&E over time. The Commission grants rate increases which allow the executives and shareholders fine salaries, bonuses, and profits. As one might readily expect, the public eats it, but that’s sort of understood.

However, in recent years, PG&E executives have figured out that ordinary over billing is just the tip of the iceberg. There are huge profits to be made if nobody is going to stop them, and nobody is.

Few years ago, PG&E ran an amazing scam on the people and got clean away with it. Briefly, it went like this: the utility siphoned-off all of its profits and passed them on to a parent corporation –– also called PG&E –– before voting its executives enormous bonuses and, just hours later, declaring bankruptcy.

It worked. Nobody went to jail. Rates got a boost. Back in business. It turns out that the utility has also been maximizing profits by misappropriating funds on a spectacular scale. According to a 171-page P.U.C. staff report, the company “diverted more than $100 million in gas safety and operations money collected from customers over a 15-year period and spent it for other purposes, including profit for stockholders and bonuses for executives...”

The misappropriations resulted in failures to perform requisite safety checks on fuel lines, one of which exploded and killed eight people on September 9, 2010.

One of the Chronicle news stories run on Friday included this remarkable observation:

“The five commission members voted unanimously ...to adopt the findings of the... staff report, the first step in a process that could result in PG&E being fined hundreds of millions of dollars for safety violations.”

It should be noted that the P.U.C. was acting only after the Commissioners had their asses kicked by the National Transportation and Safety Board, which pranged them for their “lax oversight” of the utility before the explosion in San Bruno.

Wow, they might be fined! Not the executives, but the company. The executives are safe at home with their bonuses and inflated stock holdings. And you know who’s going to pay the fines eventually, don’t you? Not them.

I don’t want to jump to any unwarranted conclusions but it would appear on the evidence that the executives who diverted the funds away from safety inspections caused the deaths of eight people as well as the destruction of 38 homes. That’s at least manslaughter.

How different would it be if I was an auto mechanic and increased my profit by pocketing the cost of but not bothering to fix the brakes on your car?

Incredibly, the big controversy now is that PG&E wants to charge rate payers 90% of the cost of a $2.2 billion ‘modernization’ plan to ‘upgrade’ the transmission lines, while the P.U.C. wants the utility to pay for it itself! You know what that means, right? The lawyers will get rich arguing about who has to pay what, and in the end the utility will pay more than it wants to and the P.U.C. will settle for granting a partial rate increase.

Couple of observations here.

One, if libertarians or quasi-libertarians such as Ron Paul –– who I’ve praised on other matters in this column –– had their way and eliminated federal regulatory oversight, the NTSB would not have existed to slam the P.U.C. and get those five commissioners off their fat asses. So there’d have been no investigation and probably no consequences.

Two, if libertarians or quasi-libertarians such as Ron Paul had their way and there were no oversight agencies, it’s conceivable that some public-spirited citizens would have hauled their 2nd-Amendment-protected rifles out of the garage and shot the fuckers at PG&E responsible for the crimes.

A society which functions, even one with a fair amount of corruption, would not lead to either of the two examples. Instead, there would be criminal investigations and indictments, jury trials and, most likely, prison terms. Long prison terms. That, you see, is one of the functions of the law in a democracy.

If these miserable excuses for human beings went to San Quentin, it might give future PG&E executives pause to consider the consequences before they plundered the public treasury.

Of course, the same may be said about the bankers.

An old friend linked me to the CREDO petition to the President demanding, or maybe asking, that an investigation be undertaken to determine who broke the law in the mortgage meltdown. He and they want the bankers investigated. If the CEOs of Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs went to prison for life –– nothing less, really, would seem sufficient considering the lives ruined by these people –– it would definitely have a salutary effect on future big shot thieves.

But that’s not going to happen even if CREDO delivers fifty million signatures to the White House because, as is obvious by now to anyone over the age of six, Obama’s in their pocket, just like Bush was. Those boys are not going to the slammer; they are going, instead, to their winter homes were they are insulated from the misery they have caused and continue to cause.

The country’s going under because when the people at the top are completely corrupted everybody else in the food chain figures they might as well do it, too. The PG&E thieves who killed those eight in San Bruno are small fry compared to the bankers who, directly or indirectly, have killed tens of thousands and ruined the lives of millions, but they are symptomatic of America, 2012.

Remember the war in Iraq? Sure you do.

Actually, that war is still going on. Thanks to the complete disaster visited upon the country by the invading and occupying forces of the New World Order, Iraq is an chaos. Internecine blood feuds, dormant under Hussein and postponed while everyone was fighting against the U.S., have re-emerged, nastier than ever and with better weapons. Such is our legacy.

The U.S. withdrew its last uniformed troops across the border with Kuwait. Some will come home. Some will head for other missions, to Afghanistan, or to the coming war against Iran.

One of the revolving door hilarity known as the Republican presidential candidates has said that he would send troops back to Iraq. Why? Because otherwise the five thousand or so dead Americans from that invasion and occupation will have died in vain.

He really said it.

But, see, the thing is, they did not die in vain, oh, no. They died in order to shovel incredible sums of money into the coffers of Halliburton. What greater sacrifice could an American make than that?

There are many reasons to be furious with the current occupant in the White House, but one of these is that the government not only failed to prosecute anyone from Halliburton –– or Dick Cheney –– it continues to do business with it. It was Halliburton which got the $300 million contract to build ‘detention facilities’, i.e. concentration camps, inside the U.S.

The Halliburton scandal has to be one of the biggest in American history. Under the Bush administration, it was the recipient of virtually every no-bid contract offered to “rebuild” Iraq, contracts steered its way, as revealed by internal e-mails, by then-Vice President Cheney, its former chief and still a major stockholder.

From the beginning of the war, Halliburton stock more than quadrupled in just four years, and no wonder. It was operating under the concept of ‘cost-plus’, a design in which a company’s profits are calculated as a percentage of the money spent on a project.

In Iraq, as it turns out, Halliburton artificially ramped-up the costs by pocketing cash, scheduling projects which were never completed, and destroying equipment by the ton in order to buy more of it. According to people on the ground and who witnessed this system in operation, it was typical for the company to buy $80,000 vehicles which would mysteriously lack something like a water pump, making them useless; the vehicles would then be torched and new ones ordered.

Halliburton had the contract to provide water for the troops. It constructed 67 water treatment plants. Unfortunately, 63 of these did not use even a drop of chlorine. U.S. troops were consequently showering with contaminated water. Some were also electrocuted because Halliburton did not do a very good job of wiring the facilities.

The Congress, under the prodding of President Bush, allocated more than $300 million for building schools, hospitals, and electrical plants. Guess where the money went. It was shipped in packages of $2 million each, shrink-wrapped, to Iraq, to the ‘Green Zone’, where then-administrator Paul Bremer had declared that U.S. laws did not apply. And from there, it simply disappeared. No schools were built. No hospitals.

That, as you may already know, was not the biggest theft of the war. Evidently, money was stolen on an even grander scale. As the late Senator Byrd (D-WVa) elicited in testimony from Department of Defense officials, more than $2.3 billion went missing in a single year. It has never been found.

Iraq represented an opportunity for theft on a previously unimaginable scale, and there were people who took advantage of that opportunity.

As lawyers might say, there is a prima facie case of embezzlement here. On what is already in the public record, there’s enough to charge the top executives of Halliburton, along with Cheney, and probably jail them for life.

But nobody got indicted. President Obama told us he wanted to “turn the page” on things like war crimes. Presumably, he was including every felony committed by Halliburton, its executives, Cheney, and everyone at DOD who conspired with them to steal the taxpayers blind.

It’s pretty amusing to hear some American Senators pontificate about how a whistle blower such as Bradley Manning allegedly ‘cost American lives’ by revealing guilty information, while they are silent about the fat cats who profited from the deaths their policies caused.

When people with power at the top of the political and economic food chain commit criminal acts, they have to be prosecuted. If they aren’t, it’s a green light for the behavior to continue.

When Barack Obama announced that he would not pursue criminal investigations of Halliburton, Cheney, and other war profiteers and embezzlers, he greased the path for these criminals to carry on. Halliburton, in fact, is still given government contracts despite manifest evidence of its criminality.

The same attitude has characterized Obama’s approach to the banking cartel which destroyed the economy, cost millions their jobs and homes and life savings. There are no criminal investigations, only a few, select civil claims where a slap on the wrist substitutes for justice. And some of the biggest crooks of all have gotten jobs in his administration. When the slimeballs who stole everything in sight are given a free pass by the President, what does that make him?

The scandal of Iraq and what America did to that country can rightfully be laid at the feet of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and numerous other neocons. The scandal which is the failure of the American government and its system of justice to hold them accountable is Obama’s, and history is not going to be kind to him.

We’re gearing up for some kind of military onslaught against the people of Iran, who have also done nothing to harm the U.S. The pretense America is using, that Iran is suspected of working on nuclear weapons development, is patently false, but that doesn’t seem to matter. When you’re America’s President, fixing to kill, charges and not evidence is all you need.

If you thought that by electing Barack Obama you would get a saner, more decent foreign policy than that of his predecessor –– which seemed at the time a cinch –– you were wrong. I was wrong, too.

And by the way, Afghanistan is also a phony war. It never had anything to do with Al Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden. It had to do with making a deal on the transportation of natural gas through that country because the only other prospective routes were through China or Iran, and it did not prove difficult to install Karzai, our friend whose former employer was Unocal.

Now that the deal’s been signed, America’s military bases in Afghanistan have been located along the pipeline route. Hell of a coincidence. We don’t care what happens to the people there any more than we cared about the Iraqis. We just want to secure a pipeline and establish some geopolitical control to counterbalance China and India.

And for all of this thievery and high politics, the deaths of a few hundred thousand Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, and probably Iranians, is obviously not bothering the conscience of America. Say, wonder what’s on CSI Miami tonight?

The G.O.P. creep who talked about Americans ‘dying in vain’, Texas Governor Rick Perry, is perhaps too dense to actually understand why these policies have been implemented. But Obama knows, and Cheney knew, and the facilitators of the disappearance of trillions of dollars knew.

And we know, if we’re paying attention at all. How we can support an administration which actively promotes this conduct and the attendant human horrors, how anyone can, is a mystery.

Another assassination that the U.S. government had nothing to do with. Brings back memories, it does. Such as the murder of Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier by car bomb in Washington, D.C., right after Kissinger and the CIA stage managed the overthrow of the Chilean government by Augusto Pinochet and the generals and the murder of Salvador Allende.

Hillary Clinton announced that the U.S. had nothing to do with it, and followed up the denial with the rather pointed remark that “We believe there has to be an understanding between Iran, its neighbors and the international community that finds a way forward for it to end its provocative behavior, end its search for nuclear weapons and rejoin the international community and be a productive member of it.” Wink, wink.

The dead man murdered by car bomb inside Iran was Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a nuclear scientist. Tellingly, the first response from the State Department was spokeswoman Victoria Nuland ducking a question about whether Washington was involved in the killing — or if the administration viewed Roshan as an innocent victim, saying “I’m not going to speak to who may or may not have done this.”

The articles on the internet seem measured, but the commentary following them is anything but. On Truthdig, the first few contributors were not mincing words:

“did she just describe irans behavior as provocative? im pretty sure the bombing of a scientist in a sovereign country is “provocative behavior” not to mention crushing a countries common people with sanctions, but thats just me.”

“Her spiel is worthy of Vito Corleone himself.”

“And we never killed Che or Lumumba or Nakruma or Allende. We had nothing to do with the hundreds of attempts on Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez. We are the blameless, the innocent USA. Whatever happened in 09/11/1973 had nothing to do with the USA... Indonesia and the 2 million, why, Kissinger says we were innocent. A better character background than one Henry Kissinger? Jack-the-Ripper perhaps? And it doesn’t stop internationally: Malcolm X, Martin King, Walter Reuther, Joe Hill.”

“Ha ha ha.  Yes, and the “Company” has not been responsible for assassination activity, since at least the murder of President Kennedy in 1963! HONEST!!!”

“This is what is truly baffling about Obamatrons, they still support these gasbags as if they are our only hope even during situations like these where the White House literally treats us like idiots.”

“President Obama claims he can assassinate anyone who he believes is now or will be potentially, in the future, a threat.  So really who knows?  Wikileaks proved that our Government isn’t honest...”

“Phony. Professional deception. Totally heartless. Murderous. And murderess.”

“Well what else could you possibly expect from the “Evil Empire,” when it is now by law able to pick you, a citizen, up on the street or out of your home and jail you indefinitely without due process in a top secret prison anywhere in the world.  What-prey-tell (pun intended) could you expect from a “government” who now has the authority to assassinate/murder anyone anywhere in the world if it “deems necessary” and is in the “Evil Empire’s” national interests.”

You’ve got to wonder. Well, I do, anyway. When Clinton makes these statements with the unmistakable addendum, the part which conveys to the Iranians that, yes, we did it, and unless you kiss our ass we’ll do worse. Who is being fooled here? The American public, maybe. The registered Democrats who, as one writer mentioned, “still support these gasbags” and won’t face up to what we’ve become. Not Europe. Not the Muslim world. Not the governments of the middle east.

Last month, the Obama administration floated a preposterous claim that an Iranian agent had tried to recruit a half-in-the-bag Mexican drug runner in a terrorist plot against the U.S. but nobody believed it.

We’re gearing up for war, no question about it. The U.S. government is sponsoring the idea that Iran is moving swiftly toward developing nuclear weapons, almost certainly untrue based on sophisticated equipment we already have in place to monitor the presence and movement of radioactive materials, but it doesn’t even really matter whether it’s true. That’s never been the point.

The U.S. did not care whether Iraq had the nonexistent WMDs. Iraq posed no threat to its neighbors for many reasons of practicality, its internal situation, geopolitics, and the balance of power in the region. But we were pissed off because Hussein had switched from the dollar to the Euro and was encouraging others to do the same. This was a very serious problem for American banks.

The U.S. likewise does not really care whether Iran is trying to obtain a nuclear device. Iran poses no threat to anyone in the region. Israel has nothing whatever to fear from Iran because Israel already has numerous nuclear weapons and would wipe Iran from the face of the earth should the latter attack it. Everyone knows this.

But the United States is playing a game. It is determined to topple the Iranian government (as we did once before, in 1953, a horror the Iranians have not forgotten) for reasons of banking. All the rest of the rhetoric, the charges about Al Qaeda and so forth, is bullshit, and the U.S. government knows that’s so.

It doesn’t matter who is President anymore. It probably hasn’t for forty years. The CIA does what it wants to do, the military does what the bankers instruct it to do, and the President makes public relations statements and collects Nobel Prizes for things he hasn’t done and never will do.

Does it matter whether Obama is doing these things because he really believes them or because he’s being ‘forced’ to by sinister powers? Does it matter to the children made orphans by Hillary’s little jokes, by the gunships and the drones and the Apache helicopters and Hellfire missiles? Do the dead care about reasons, however nobly expressed?

This is an empire, mowing down anyone in its way. That’s what empires do, while proclaiming fealty to democratic ideals. But on the internet, all over the internet, freed of FOX News (sic) and CNN and all the other network liars, people are thinking for themselves and they are evidently not fooled anymore.

Any government which claims the right to murder foreigners, and which sends out death squads with hit lists, as America now does, has forfeited its right to any international standing and its place in the community of nations.

It is said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, probably by people who imitate. Copying doesn’t sound as good.

The Israeli parliament yesterday voted 37-8 to increase the duration of incarceration without trial imposed on illegal refugees from 60 days to an indefinite term, probably to honor the similar conditions in America’s notorious Guantanamo Prison, which celebrated its 10 year anniversary yesterday with a round of water boarding.

Some in Israel argued that detention without trial was unconstitutional, but those voices were mostly ignored by partisans who claimed that the instability of the situation in the middle east warranted stricter measures. Anyhow, if Israel’s high court resembles America’s, things like constitutions might no longer pose a problem.

Anyone who assists an illegal migrant will face up to 15 years in prison.

Also yesterday, Prime Minister Netanyahu requested an increase in Israel’s military budget of $780 million. Last month, Israel moved to complete a $160 million program to construct the 150-mile border fence with Egypt.

One reason given for the growing military spending was the uncertainty of what will happen if the Assad government in Syria is overthrown.

I’d wondered about Syria. Since in the west we no longer have a meaningful free press, it’s hard to know the real reason of purpose for anything, but this explanation, courtesy of Al Jazeera, goes a long way. After all, the Syrian government keeps shooting its citizens but the United States, which usually seizes upon any excuse at all to bomb people, has been oddly silent. Now I get it: the brutal dictatorship in Syria is supportive of Israel.

Barack Obama promised to close Guantanamo but as of today there remain 171 prisoners, about 150 of whom are considered even by the American Pentagon to be innocent of any crime. Why then are they in prison?

Israeli authorities disclosed that they are expanding detention facilities to hold tens of thousands more prisoners, especially since they expect a flood of refugees from Syria any day now and you can never be too careful.

The U.S. has recently constructed new prison camps but there hasn’t been any publicity. Hell, there was hardly any publicity when the Congress passed new legislation making it legal for the army, or the President, or anybody he or she designates, to take people into custody without charges, lock them up without trial, and throw away the key.

It’s a new world, they keep telling us. The ‘they’ who keep telling us this are the same ‘they’ who have been changing the rules to get rid of the troublesome constitutional roadblocks to effective warfare. Tapping your phone? If you’re not doing anything wrong, why would you object? Can’t be too careful. Anyone might be an enemy.

Better to feel-up eight year olds at the airport than risk another 9-11.

George Bush used to claim that people from other countries wanted to attack America because they ‘hate our freedom.’ But, of course, the people who hate our freedom are the rulers of America. And if we don’t defend it, they’ll take it away.

Are you reading the same stuff I am? Not just the articles on Alternet and Salon and Truthout and Rolling Stone but the comments affixed to them?

That’s often where the meat is, the commentary. After all, the columns themselves are usually written by somewhat sober, functional journalists, people with plans for the future. They are as a whole unlikely to burn things to the ground out of pique, and therefore they write measured treatises, calm analyses.

The commentary is what tells us where the country’s at.

The country’s royally pissed off.

Couple of years ago, there was plenty of anger, but mostly it was contained. There were calls for impeachment, investigations, even indictments.

Now, they’re prepared to do without the niceties. In one of the typical disputes yesterday over which candidates were worse than which others, and whether Ron Paul was crazy or Obama a liar, there was this:

“The government is a MACHINE and responds to whomever controls it. Our deranged, psychopathic, rapaciously greedy elite is now in control of our government. The government is the cape and the sword of he who stands hidden behind it. In theory, as you all know, WE control the government for our own good. In reality, we have not had control of our own government in generations nor will we have control ever again unless we completely remove the layer of parasites who now own it. Remove, here means REMOVE as in radical elitectomy best achieved with a guillotine-like instrument. All recovered proceeds to the debt. The restoration of our national health is just a rope pull away.”

A rope pull away.

Reminded me of the Stone lyrics from back before they had all the blood transfusions. “War, children, it’s just a shot away, it’s just a shot away...”

I keep reading these articles and accompanying tirades and I’m thinking every column I’m writing these days feels like postcards from Crazytown.

Really, I want to write about something else, but it’s mesmerizing, this circus act. I mean, Rick Santorum. There was a piece on him yesterday and I thought of simply reprinting his comments about Iran in their entirety. He’s an imbecile, a walking, talking bozo with no more right to run for President than a guy you might select at random passed out from too much glue sniffing down on Market Street.

Where do they come from, people like Santorum? Is there an idiot factory somewhere in Indiana, operated maybe by the Quayle family? Do they not realize how utterly stupid they are? Seriously. When Rick looks into the mirror before loping onto the platform for a speech, what does he see? What does he think?

I know there are plenty of subnormal intelligence operators out there. Santorum was, after all, elected once in Pennsylvania. People voted for him. They did again in Iowa last week and, probably, in New Hampshire yesterday –– I haven’t seen any returns yet. But doesn’t it dawn on him that there are quite a few better-prepared people around? People who can find Iran on a map. People who can find their asses with both hands. Does he think intelligence doesn’t matter in a Commander-in-Chief? Does he think he’s intelligent?

I suppose the ‘rope pull’ guy is just frustrated. What will it take now? Simply electing a good candidate or two seems wildly insufficient. The system is corrupted almost beyond belief. Both major parties are hopeless. Even if one is generally worse than the other, the differences are narrowing. On policy, you can’t tell them apart as once you could.

The best candidates are unelectable or people most of us never heard of. Anyone who runs as an independent will be excluded from debates, made to disappear in the media, and accused of throwing the election one way or another, and if by some miracle a good person were actually to win, then what? Probably taken into that back room Bill Hicks spoke of, where the lights dim and the screen comes down and he or she is shown video footage the rest of us have never seen.

Personally, I don’t think Occupy has any staying power, but something else is sure to rise out of it. There is too much pressure building, too much anger, too many people talking about guillotines.

Happy Anniversary, America! Today marks ten years in which your country has locked people up at the concentration camp at Guantanamo, roughly seven hundred of them, with an estimated 600 or more completely innocent of any crime. Most have been sent to whatever country pro bono lawyers could locate which would take them but several dozen remain.

Thanks to the new law Barack Obama signed, those remaining at Guantanamo, without charges, can be held there for the rest of their lives without even a trial.

Quite a few have died in the prison. Exact numbers are hard to come by. There have been hunger strikes, beatings and other tortures. None of the innocent have been compensated for having their lives torn apart, the years stolen from them. Nobody’s received an apology.

America’s fighting a war, after all, and there are bound to be disturbing consequences. It was Dick Cheney, the Prince of Darkness himself, who claimed that “in times of emergency, governments may have to go to the dark side.” I hope it will not prove too difficult for him when he makes the mistake of traveling outside of the U.S. and is arrested for war crimes. He may learn first hand what the dark side feels like.

America’s President promised on the campaign trail that he would immediately close Guantanamo Prison. Three years later, he has not done so, thwarted, according to him, by Congress, which voted to forbid that U.S. funds be used for relocating prisoners, and which won’t let him bring prisoners to the U.S. for trials.

Even were detainees have won habeas corpus petitions, the appellate court in the District of Columbia, where the cases are heard, has refused to order their release.

Now Obama needn’t worry. The Defense Authorization Act lets the President lock up anyone he wants to, for as long as he or his successors want to, without bothering with complications such as actual charges, confronting accusers, the presumption of innocence, or right to trial. Cheney would be proud.

The rules don’t apply anymore, you see, because it’s emergency time.

You can’t say they’re lacking nerve, those Obama people. Cranking up the reelection machinery and appealing to all the grass roots folks who helped bankroll the 2008 race.

I’ve been getting the e-mails, cheery missives proclaiming that the job we all began together isn’t quite done, that we’ve had a hard time overcoming the obstructionists in the Congress but another four years and some big Democratic victories and we’ll be on the way home with those dreams we all dreamed, the change we could believe in.

Since the only people really doing well under the first three years of Hope are CEOs and major corporate shareholders, and maybe some mercenaries and Halliburton construction workers, and I’m not one of them, I won’t have the cash to toss their way like I did in 2008, but I’m sure they can make up for it.

After all, if there’s anyone Barack Obama didn’t betray over the past three years, it’s been his banker friends.

Remember when his first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, left to return to (and take over) Chicago? He was replaced by Bill Daley, formerly a top executive at J.P. Morgan Chase. Well, now, Bill Daley is gone, presumably to some place where he can cash in on the help he’s been to his old associates, and he’s been replaced by...

Jacob Lew, fresh out of Citibank! That’s right, Citibank, the bank which would’ve gone under thanks to the crooked deals it was concocting but for the bailout you and I paid for. But Jack Lew, whose division made billions betting that homeowners wouldn’t be able to pay their mortgages, is just the right guy for the President because he’s proven that even amidst unrestrained criminality he knows how to dodge and weave like a pro.

Maybe I’m getting jaded but I like my perfidy with a little more subtlety. Bad enough that Obama named the CEO of General Electric –– the corporation which raked in more than $14 billion last year without paying any taxes –– his top guy on the Economic Recovery Board, and that he went out of his way, at a time of financial difficulty and budgetary horror stories, to extend the pointless Bush tax cuts for billionaires he’d promised not to renew, and that he’d installed at Treasury one Timothy Geithner, the screwhead who’d run the New York fed and was widely viewed as a nitwit, and that he reappointed Bernanke, who ought to be answering questions under oath before a criminal grand jury –– bad enough that he’d done all of this, he’s got the chutzpah to ask me for cash while naming Jacob Fucking Lew of Citibank his chief of staff.

To paraphrase Bill Hicks, he’s gonna need a wheelbarrow to carry those balls around.

The first news stories on the switch mentioned that Daley had been brought in originally to help Obama “repair” what were seen as “strained relations” with the “business community.” Hard to imagine what that could’ve been. Were there major corporations which didn’t get billions in taxpayers’ bailout money?

The strained relations this President ought to have been worried about were with the people who supported him, worked for him, contributed to his campaign, believed he meant what he said. On message boards all over the internet, Obama loyalists are now trying to repair the damage but I do not think that is going to be possible. If you pee on people long enough, eventually they figure out that it’s not raining.

Tonight I’m seeing pieces on Obama’s recess appointment of Richard Cordray, puffed up as though this was some kind of gutsy, aggressive, meaningful act. Wow, look at him! Defying the Republicans!

The guy reminds me of an adolescent who stays out fifteen minutes past the deadline his parents imposed as a show of courage and defiance. He’ll probably have to rest up for a while before he tries anything else.

The United States is going to attack another sovereign nation without provocation and for reasons of empire so shameful and indefensible they can’t be shared with the American people.

Everything you will see, read, and hear by way of U.S. mass media about the new war against Iran will be a lie.

There was a time, one must explain to the young in my country, when the U.S. did not attack other nations just because we felt like it. Maybe we were restrained by the existence of the Soviet Union as a counterbalance. Maybe we were restrained by our own checkered history or some adherence to principle, or because that sort of thing was a violation of international law and we claimed to believe in international law.

Those times are gone. My country now attacks and/or invades any country it wants to, on any flimsy pretext it chooses to invent, and most Americans are so brainwashed, lazy, or merely bonehead-stupid that the government keeps getting away with it.

The reason advanced for invading Iraq, the mythical weapons of mass destruction we knew weren’t there, was nonetheless trumpeted by the television networks as gospel and echoed in the columns of newspapers such as The New York Times.

The reason for Afghanistan, which most Americans still believe, was supposedly about Al Qaeda and the World Trade Center attacks, but Bin Laden is dead and Al Qaeda is barely present in Afghanistan; it’s the Taliban, formerly a U.S. ally, which threatens the government of the drug pushers America backs.

America the liberator is so hated that when the last U.S. troops were withdrawn over the Iraq border to Kuwait the Iraqis celebrated wildly in the streets.

America the protector is so distrusted that the Afghan government now demands that we turn over control of the infamous Bagram Air base, where CIA and other U.S. personnel have tortured thousands.

The reasons for bombing Libya were flagrantly false –– as much of the world knew –– but the American media bought them and, therefore, so did the American public.

Now we are getting ready to blow up Iran and its people, despite the fact that it is far closer to democracy than is Saudi Arabia, our dear reactionary friend and ally, and offers no real threat to anyone, despite the lies of the U.S. government, its Secretary of State, and the crazier elements of the Israeli government which, no doubt, has helped precipitate the latest situation.

In a show of belligerence, the U.S. military is holding joint ‘training exercises’ with Israel, the largest such ever held. Just a coincidence, says the U.S. State Department.

America has wanted to attack Iran for a long time and has been looking for a pretext. Unfortunately, the United Nations was no help because its investigative commission kept issuing reports denying the presence of nuclear materials or the means to develop same. For twelve years, the U.S. has waited patiently for the commission to need a new director. When the job opened up, the Obama administration lobbied heavily for the appointment of its personal choice, someone who had already pledged to be of greater assistance to the U.S. than had been his predecessor.

The so-called U.N. Report on which America now rattles its sabers and moves ships into position to threaten more blood is actually comprised of the same long-ago discredited documents previous iterations of the Committee had seen and discarded. No matter. Truth is not the point. In the words of the infamous Downing Street Memo, the ‘intelligence is being fixed around it.’ We just needed a cover story the President could recite, standing in front of a phalanx of enormous American flags.

In fact, the probability is that no such nuclear weapons program actually exists in Iran. We know this because we have for many years employed sophisticated spy apparatus, both personal and mechanical, to monitor that nation’s behavior. Included in the equipment is a device which tracks the presence and path of nuclear material by reading any levels of extant radiation.

Based on invented stories, the United States has begun to impose increasingly punitive sanctions against Iran. The latest is the shutting off of its oil exportation scheduled by June. This, as Ron Paul had the guts to tell an L.A. Times reporter last week, is an act of war.

Iran will have no alternative but to do as it is now threatening, interdict oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. When that happens, America will then scream about it and launch an attack, probably with the assistance of Israel. It is a crisis manufactured by the United States out of whole cloth, but it will be made to seem otherwise.

U.S. media already enjoys painting the Iranian leader as a lunatic, perhaps forgetting that its own leaders have a worse record when it comes to spilling blood.

The President rarely even asks permission from Congress, and Congress rarely raises any objections anyhow. We are sending drone aircraft to assassinate people in other countries on a regular basis and few are objecting. We use spy planes over other countries and get angry when any are shot down.

The arrogance of America is breathtaking. Like Rome, it just takes what it wants. Like Hitler’s Germany, it invades on any pretext at all and invents hostile acts to which it then ‘responds.’ It acts as though the rest of the world belongs to it.

Lately one hears the noxious term ‘American exceptionalism.’ It is a phrase used much as Hitler’s storm troopers and propagandists used the term ‘master race,’ and with the same purpose. If the empire’s citizens are indeed superior in some way, exempted from ordinary standards of conduct because they are better, then the rules its leaders have been breaking with increasing impunity, the rules of civilized nations, may be said not to apply to it.

It is not a war crime when America fires remote-controlled missiles at carelessly chosen targets because, after all, America is special. It is not murder when people are chosen by America’s State Department and placed on death lists for assassination because America is special.

The foreign policy of the United States over the past eleven years can reasonably be described as vicious, systematic killing in the service of corporations and the international banking industry. That’s why it attacked Iraq, why it invaded Afghanistan, why it strikes Pakistan with missiles, why it flooded Libya with CIA personnel and mercenaries to invent a ‘popular uprising’ which could then be backed by NATO bombings. That’s why it’s screwing around with most of the countries in Africa and why it’s gearing up to attack Iran.

2012 is an election year. America will be voting for candidates for President. But only two known candidates are standing against the destruction of the Constitution and the mass murder of people around the world, and they are so marginalized that one, Ron Paul, is made a target of bad jokes inside the G.O.P., and the other, Rocky Anderson, can’t get his new party on the ballot and is being completely ignored by the media.

Meanwhile, apparently, all other candidates are taken seriously just because they peddle the same insane policies as the current President, regardless of their clear incompetence, lack of qualifications, and general stupidity.

The Democrats point to idiots like Romney, Gingrich and, God help us all, Rick Santorum, and say we’ve got to work hard to re-elect Barack Obama because look at the other guys!

Every night since Obama’s inauguration three years ago, there have been innocent children screaming in terror under American bombs. Sorry, Democratic Party, you will not be getting my support this year and maybe never again. I’m checking out of the whorehouse.

There’s this controversy erupting all over the internet now concerning an abortion that did or did not take place in Pennsylvania some years ago, with partisans flaming each other on Alternet and Salon.com, among other sites, and charges of hypocrisy and so forth.

It’s a fairly ordinary little story, actually, moderately freaky but nothing you haven’t heard of before, and you wouldn’t be hearing of it now but for the fact that the couple involved is Rick and Karen Santorum, the former an actual candidate for President, bizarre as that may be, who has always opposed abortion, even in the case where the mother’s life is endangered by carrying the foetus to term.

Santorum, the male, received a plurality of the votes from self-described evangelical Christians in the Iowa caucuses, and that same group tells pollsters that he’s their first choice for the G.O.P. nomination, which is a pretty good indication, if you were lacking any, that the country I and many of my readers live in is headed into the sewer.

Karen Santorum, the woman who did or did not have an abortion, wrote a book on the experience, an indication of her self-importance, in which she describes the agony of it and the difficulty of her choice when it came to measures the doctors suggested might save her life.

This was a late term abortion, if it was an abortion, five months along, and it was done after doctors told the Santorums that the foetus she carried would certainly be born dead, and that the infection Karen had would probably kill her.

I’m not judging these people for their decision. I wouldn’t personally be into risking my wife’s life over the delivery of a dead foetus, but that’s my sense of things and maybe not yours. And whether it was or wasn’t an abortion, the evidence is pretty good that it was –– the medicos used the drug Picotin, which speeds birth –– is not my issue.

My issue is that after the abortion or stillbirth, or whatever it was, the Santorums brought the dead foetus back home with them to display to their other children. They had it in a jar and stuck it on the dining room table.

We may disagree, you and I, Rick and Karen, over the definition of abortion. We may disagree over the issue itself. If it were up to me, abortion would be legal because I do not think we have established when the soul enters the body and are not likely to, and absent knowing that I am not prepared to interpose legal sanctions on anybody.

But on the issue of crazy, I have some pretty strong views, one of which is that people who would display a dead foetus to their children are completely, totally nuts.

The Ron Paul argument, what fun it is! All over the internet now because, nightmare that he represents to Democrats and Republicans alike, the crazy mo-fo is gaining ground, and with a decent Iowa finish, too, and that’s really bad news for the guys who own the country.

They’ve got this good thing going, both major parties kissing their rings, taking their blood money. A lot of money, a lot of blood. Here they’ve got Obama gearing up for another war, this time against Iran, and the putative leaders of both parties falling all over each other to claim that probably the President won’t be brutal enough, and there’s this fellow Ron Paul peeing in the punch bowl.

Who invited him?

Last week, Paul told an L.A. Times reporter that the United States’ sanctions against Iran amount to an act of war. Which it is. Whoa! What the fug?

You can tell that the Democratic Party establishment is going batshit by the frantic tone of some columns in such semi-august sites as Salon.com and ReaderSupportedNews. Tonight, Salon ran two articles, one entitled ‘Progressive Beer Goggles for Ron Paul,” the other “Ron Paul: Still Loony.” The gist seems to be that even though he might be right about a few things –– you know, small things like the Bill of Rights or invading other countries –– he’s either ideologically fried (“Beer Goggles”) or crazy (“Still Loony”).

Ideologically no good? Try Barack Obama, the constitutional law expert who is faster throwing out the Bill of Rights than his reactionary predecessor. Crazy? How about Rick Santorum, who brought a stillborn baby back home to show his other children. Don’t talk to me about ideologies or madness because Ron Paul is, in comparison to the competition, functionally consistent, honest, and sane.

Of course, he’s done some crazy stuff. He’s also taken positions on what he thinks of as the ‘free market’ that wander through fantasyland as far as I’m concerned. But...

Been looking at video clips. Ron Paul on the House floor pleading with his fellow representatives not to extend the Patriot Act because sacrificing freedom for a promise of security is a fool’s bargain. Ron Paul saying that the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, were likely caused by resentment throughout the middle east at America’s crimes against those people. Ron Paul’s advertisement asking whether we might understand things a little better were the Chinese to establish a military base in Texas and occasionally kill innocent Americans. Ron Paul, at a GOP debate, getting booed for pointing out that the drug war is overwhelmingly biased against blacks when 14% of drug users are black, 35% of those arrested are black, and 60% of those imprisoned are black.

Ron Paul outraged that an American President could order the assassination of an American citizen. Ron Paul calling Bradley Manning an American hero. Ron Paul defending Julian Assange.

Oh, yeah, they’ve dug up the old newsletter clippings, snippets of racial idiocy he didn’t write but which went out under his name, just a few of them and twenty years old, but still...

On the internet, claims that Ron Paul would outlaw abortion, which is not true.

Great article on Salon by Glenn Greenwald, who is not so easily suckered into the ‘you have to back Obama’ argument of morally-bankrupt Democrats willing to overlook any crime imaginable because, after all, someone else would be worse. That’s the position of the nitwit Joe Conason on Truthdig. As I said, so exciting out there. Dueling notions. Madness. And ten months to go before the next Presidential election and the likely swearing in of a disgrace to humanity, whichever candidate wins.

The debate continues every day on a web site near you. Week ago, I awoke to a fiery exchange on Truthout. Today was the aforementioned Salon tirade –– maybe trying to make up for the Greenwald column. One fellow published several lengthy pieces excoriating Paul for pretty much everything he ever said or did, plus quite a few things he didn’t actually say or do but, what they hey, might as well toss them in.

The media may be beginning to realize that at least some of Paul’s support in the Iowa caucuses was from antiwar Democrats and there is much hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing and general consternation among Democratic party loyalists.

The thing which makes Paul such a problem is that he really believes what he says. In politics, that throws people into a tizzy. He agrees with Dennis Kucinich on war, bankers, civil liberties, and lobbyists. Meanwhile, he also agrees with right-wing crazies on regulatory agencies, public welfare, Social Security, and Medicare.

It’s quite possible to be a progressive, even a radical, and have doubts about federal regulatory agencies. That’s not because corporations should be free to run amok but because they do anyhow while the agencies, which they have long-since infiltrated, provide cover. That’s not Paul’s position, but it’s not far away from mine.

Back in the stone age, when I was a candidate for the state legislature, I spoke at a gathering some of my supporters had set up for me in Mill Valley, a then-quite-hip enclave in Marin County. In attendance were a few members of the liberal/left pantheon, including people from Mother Jones and some environmental heavyweights.

I always enjoyed challenging the assumptions of any crowd I was in, so I told the assemblage that I had strong reservations about federal regulatory agencies and thought we might abolish some of them. The reaction was as you might expect: shock, dismay, anger. I lost a few votes that night and some cash, which we were in need of. Probably should’ve kept my mouth shut, but the temptation was too great.

Thing is, the system was already broken back then, some 34 years ago. But because we had created these agencies it gave many of us a false sense of security. We could eat whatever was sold in the stores because the government had checked it. We could rely on the FDA or whatever it was because it wouldn’t be legal if there were problems. So as a consequence, we could get poisoned because we trusted the government to do our thinking for us.

Of course, I don’t really agree with Paul on this and I didn’t really agree with what I was saying that night. We do need the government to keep watch on some things because we can’t realistically know all this stuff ourselves. But my point was that in relying on the government we were getting lazy about it. We had ceded our thinking to others.

And, as we know by now, all of these federal agencies protecting us have been turned into brokers for the very industries they are supposes to regulate. The revolving door has guaranteed that, along with wholesale bribery. The people Barack Obama has selected to oversee agriculture are actually shills working for Monsanto, and the guy he picked to head the council on economic recovery was the CEO of General Electric, which paid no taxes last years but happens to own NBC and its siblings.

God, I am so tired of crooked politicians and lying, thieving swine. I know Ron Paul isn’t going to win, and maybe, considering his attitude about the federal government, that’s a good thing. But look at the rest of these useless jerks. Are any of them any better?

It’s called HAARP, acronym for High Energy Active Auroral Research Program.  It is a military project of the United States government, jointly operated by the Air Force and the Navy.  The military says that “it is purely a scientific research facility posing no threat to potential adversaries and has no value as a military target.”  

Nothing to worry about, nothing to see here, folks.  Move along now... 

The U.S. government began building it about twenty years ago, an offshoot of Reagan’s SDI program.  It became operational in the year 2000.  It is not exactly about research.  HAARP, as it happens, is the scariest, craziest weapons system on the planet and we don’t know shit about it. 

Let’s begin with a Report from the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Security and Disarmament, which held a hearing on the subject in February, 1988.  The U.S. and NATO were invited to send representatives but declined to do so.  

The Subcommittee described HAARP as “a research project using a ground based apparatus, an array of antennae each powered by its own transmitter, to heat up portions of ionosphere with powerful radio beams. The energy generated heats up parts of the ionosphere; this results in holes in the ionosphere and produces artificial 'lenses'.” 

The final Report concluded that HAARP had military purposes: 

“Enormous quantities of energy can be controlled by manipulating the electrical characteristics of the atmosphere. If used as a military weapon this can have a devastating impact on an enemy. HAARP can deliver millions of times more energy to a given area than any other conventional transmitter. The energy can also be aimed at a moving target which should constitute a potential anti-missile system.” 

HAARP consists of a system of powerful antennas, constructed in Gokoma, Alaska, and overseen by the Air Force’s Space Vehicles Directorate.  The antennas are capable of creating controlled local modifications of the ionosphere.  HAARP aims to control space, and to have the ability to spy on anyone and anything, but that’s only scratching the surface.  It can also trigger floods, droughts, hurricanes, and earthquakes –– and  destabilize agricultural and ecological systems of entire regions.  

Although it has already been used on numerous documented occasions to alter the weather, it has never been part of the debate on global climate change, an omission which is not accidental.  

HAARP uses have been redefined over time.  According to the newsletter of the Earth Island Institute, “significant changes occurring in the description of HAARP research included a newly described emphasis on earth-penetrating tomography permitting the detection of tunnels, underground shelters and other forms of 'counterproliferation;'”  

A 1993 Environmental Impact Statement drafted by the Air Force called the project a study of the ionosphere “...to better understand and use it to enhance communications and surveillance systems for both civil and defense purposes."  This is like calling the firing of hellfire missiles an experiment in better understanding airborne trajectories.

Consider the ionosphere.  The earth is wrapped in what Earth Island calls a “donut-shaped” magnetic field.  Circular lines descend from the North Pole and emerge from the South Pole.  The ionosphere is an electromagnetic wave conductor, 100 kms above the earth, which consists of a layer of electrically-charged particles acting as a shield from solar winds.  From everything we know about it, and about the crucial role it plays in protecting earth from constant bombardment of high energy particles from space, you might think it’s a good idea not to fuck with the ionosphere.  The U.S. government would not agree with you. 

Another fun fact about the ionosphere.  It rests above natural waves, related to the electrical activity in the atmosphere.  The waves are called ‘The Schumann Resonance’, with the strongest at 7.8 Hz.  These are extremely low frequency (ELF) waves that exist naturally in the earth’s electromagnetic ‘cavity’ between the earth and the ionosphere.  

It is probably not coincidental that these ‘earth brain waves’ are identical to the spectrum of our own, individual, human brain waves.  Probably, we ought not to mess around with these, either.  

HAARP’s antecedents show a long pattern of military planning designed to produce weather control weaponry –– and much more.

The U.S. military, as revealed in congressional hearings on Oceans and International Environment, has been conducting experiments in climate modification from at least the 1970s, and it’s known that as far back as 1958 the Defense Department was studying “ways to manipulate the charges of the earth and sky and so affect the weather" by using an electronic beam to ionize or de-ionize the atmosphere over a given area, according to Captain Howard T. Orville, President Eisenhower’s chief advisor on weather modification.  

By 1966, academics were working on military uses of weather modification.  Two such programs, Project Skyfire and Project Storm Fury –– designed to manipulate lightning  and create hurricanes –– were auditioned in Viet Nam.

Professor Gordon J.F. MacDonald, associate director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at U.C.L.A., and a member of President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee –– and later, astoundingly, a member of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality –– was an enthusiastic proponent of the use of weather manipulation, climate modification, polar ice cap melting or destabilization, ozone depletion techniques, earthquake engineering, ocean wave control and brain wave manipulation using the planet's energy fields.  

He cheerily wrote that these types of weapons would be developed and, when used, would be virtually undetectable by their victims.  If so, MacDonald was anticipating HAARP.  

By the 1970s, President Carter’s National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in his book "Between Two Ages" that: "Technology will make available, to the leaders of major nations, techniques for conducting secret warfare, of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need be appraised... Techniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm. " 

By 1999, a former French military officer writing in ‘Intelligence Newsletter” referred to ‘unconventional warfare’ using ‘radio frequencies’ and said that both the U.S. and the Soviet Union had "mastered the know-how needed to unleash sudden climate changes (hurricanes, drought) in the early 1980s (using) ELF waves"  

Declassified Air Force documents also anticipated the military uses of HAARP: 

“From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small-scale tailoring of natural weather patterns to complete dominance of global communications and counterspace control, weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary. In the United States, weather-modification will likely become a part of national security policy with both domestic and international applications. Our government will pursue such a policy, depending on its interests, at various levels.”  

How weather modification might become “part of national security policy with...domestic... applications” invites the sort of questions you are right now trying not to ask yourself.

The intentions of the U.S. government with respect to HAARP, though publicly cloaked in the ‘research’ fig leaf, are pretty easy to discern by review of its known history.

The Alaska facility was built by ARCO Power Technologies, a subsidiary of Atlantic Richfield.  In June, 1994, ARCO sold the second phase of the construction project to E-Systems, one of the world’s largest intelligence contractors.  At that time, $1.8 billion of E-Systems sales were to the CIA, NSA, and other U.S. spy operations.  Half of that amount was for black ops, projects so secret even Congress has never told what they are.  Shortly after E-Systems got the contract, it was in turn purchased by Raytheon, one of the 50 largest corporations in the world and a major defense contractor.  

Twelve of the patents Raytheon bought, the so-called Eastlund patents after Bernard J. Eastlund, the inventor, are the foundation of HAARP.  

One such, U.S. Patent # 4,686,605, "Method and Apparatus for Altering a Region in the Earth's Atmosphere, Ionosphere; and/or Magnetosphere," was sealed for a year under a government Secrecy Order.  When finally published, its text was alarming.  In part, it reads: 

"Thus, this invention provides the ability to put unprecedented amounts of power in the Earth's atmosphere at strategic locations and to maintain the power injection level particularly if random pulsing is employed, in a manner far more precise and better controlled than heretofore accomplished by the prior art, particularly by detonation of nuclear devices of various yields at various altitudes... "

"...it is possible not only to interfere with third party communications but to take advantage of one or more such beams to carry out a communications network even though the rest of the world's communications are disrupted. Put another way, what is used to disrupt another's communications can be employed by one knowledgeable of this invention as a communication network at the same time."  

The remaining Eastlund patents, according to researcher Nick Begich, told how to make "Nuclear-sized Explosions without Radiation," Power-beaming systems, over-the-horizon radar, detection systems for missiles carrying nuclear warheads, electromagnetic pulses previously produced by thermonuclear weapons and other Star-Wars tricks. This cluster of patents underlay the HAARP weapon system. 

Dr. Begich and fellow investigator Jeane Manning, co-authors of “Angels Don’t Play This HAARP,” discovered that the government has accelerated its experimentation with the possibilities opened by the program.  These include: 

* Use of HAARP with a spacelab to deliver an enormous amount of energy comparable to a nuclear bomb anywhere on earth by way of laser and particle beams.  This will be sold to the public as a weapons shield, or even as a method of ‘repairing’ the ozone layer.  

* Modification of the earth’s electromagnetic field as a part of a new arsenal of ‘kinder,l gentler’ weapons.  

* The destabilization of the national economies of target countries in concert with expansionist policies of the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO.  Countries which resist imposition of agricultural controls –– such as forced use of GMO crops –– may be pushed to the brink of starvation by artificially-induced drought.  One advantage the military documents describe repeatedly is that target countries will not be able to tell they’ve been targeted.  

* Production of nuclear weapons explosions without radiation.  

According to Begich and Manning, Air Force documents revealed that a system had been developed for manipulating and disturbing human mental processes through pulsed radio-frequency radiation over large geographical areas. 

This horrifying battery of violent mechanisms is not science fiction.  

As Brzezinski wrote, more than 25 years ago, "Political strategists are tempted to exploit research on the brain and human behavior. Geophysicist Gordon J.F. MacDonald, a specialist in problems of warfare, says accurately-timed, artificially-excited electronic strokes could lead to a pattern of oscillations that produce relatively high power levels over certain regions of the earth ... in this way one could develop a system that would seriously impair the brain performance of very large populations in selected regions over an extended period"  

Fifteen years ago, Congress allocated $15 million to develop earth-penetrating tomography using signals bounced off the ionosphere.  The ostensible use was cited as a means of locating minerals, munitions, and tunnels.  One problem is that the frequency required for earth-penetrating radiation is the frequency most cited for disruption of human mental functions.  It may also disrupt the migratory patterns of fish and birds, who depend on undisturbed electromagnetic energy fields to find their routes.  

Scientists are scared.  Eleanor Rauscher, an expert in high energy physics, warns "You're pumping tremendous energy into an extremely delicate molecular configuration that comprises these multi-layers we call the ionosphere.  The ionosphere is prone to catalytic reactions, if a small part is changed, a major change in the ionosphere can happen." 

Physicist Daniel Winter, Ph.D., of Waynesville, North Carolina, says, "HAARP high-frequency emissions can couple with longwave (extremely-low-frequency, or ELF) pulses the Earth grid uses to distribute information as vibrations to synchronize dances of life in the biosphere."  He terms this geomagnetic action 'Earth's information bloodstream,' and says it is likely that coupling of HAARP HF (high-frequency) with natural ELF can cause unplanned, unsuspected side effects.  

This use of HAARP technology has been described by one critic as a bunch of kids poking sticks at a hibernating bear to see what happens.   

The government, however, has big plans.  While the most sinister uses of HAARP include mass killings without radiation, targeted creation of drought and floods, and the ability to shut down all communications systems except the one controlled by the military, its worst implications may be that forces are being unleashed which no one knows how to predict.  

One expert, an engineer, writes: "HAARP will not burn holes in the ionosphere. That is a dangerous understatement of what HAARP's giant gigawatt beam will do. Earth is spinning relative to thin electric shells of the multilayer membrane of ion-o-spheres that absorb and shield Earth's surface from intense solar radiation, including charged particle storms in solar winds erupting from the sun. Earth's axial spin means that HAARP -- in a burst lasting more than a few minutes -- will slice through the ionosphere like a microwave knife. This produces not a hole but a long tear -- an incision."

There is more, much more, but this is enough for now.  With one more item.  

On July 6, 2001, two months before the Trade Center attacks, something bizarre took place in Hartsville, Tennessee.  According to an investigative piece by a local journalist, Alfred Webre, who personally witnessed some of the phenomena, there was what amounted to an ‘electronic warfare attack on a radio station and newspaper’ which caused the station and paper to be completely blacked out, with no workable communications available.  

Eyewitness accounts are the stuff of old science fiction or new right-wing paranoia, take your pick.  But the facts that can be documented, regardless of eyewitness stories, raise disturbing questions.  

Here’s Webre’s report, in part: 

“HARTSVILLE, TENN - Newly released documentary and eyewitness evidence now links an apparent July 6, 2001 electronic warfare attack on a radio station and weekly newspaper in Hartsville, Tennessee to a nearby unacknowledged secret access project. This secret project, eyewitnesses say, includes the U.S. Air Force as paymaster, U.S. government aircraft as transportation and security craft; military troops in black uniforms; and black unmarked triangular aircraft. The project may also include a secret electronic warfare unit capable of disabling nearby media outlets with destructive electromagnetic energy. 

The targets suffered what WJKM station personnel described as an ‘electromagnetic blast” in which a power surge “entered the station not only by way of the power lines but also through the phone lines and antenna system."  The whole system was blown.  

WJKM general manager Ted Randall recounted numerous witness accounts and described a ‘flashing blue pulse’ which accompanied the destruction, something he noted usually accompanies the discharge of electromagnetic pulse weapons.  He also produced recordings of an audible electronic hum which he said was such an attack’s electronic signature.  

Witnesses said that a disused former nuclear power plant, five miles from the station and still officially defunct, received the installation of “an unusually large switching system” which, investigation showed, had been commissioned by the government and paid for by an Air Force check.  

Randall noted that “Historically, the U.S. Air Force has pioneered in the development and use of electronic warfare against civilian targets and populations, notably in the NATO war in Yugoslavia.”  He said that WJKM’s investigation had eliminated other possible causes of the electromagnetic blast, such as a power transformer malfunction caused by birds or internal mechanical problems.  Also, of course, these possibilities would not account for the simultaneous frying of the newspaper’s system.  

Webre wrote: 

“Although the nuclear facility has been officially closed for some time, eyewitnesses now testify to clandestine activities going on at the site. These include tractor-trailer trucks entering and leaving the former nuclear power plant at 2 or 3 AM; sightings of C-130 military aircraft flying over the facility as if to land; sightings of unmarked black helicopters monitoring the area; sightings of military troops in unmarked black uniforms... Civilians venturing near the site have reported being aggressively ejected by a private police force of about 30 plainclothes men. 

“On the air, Randall described photographs of dead, electronically-fried birds that littered a mile-square area around the radio station (posted on the station's Internet website at http://www.1090wjkm.com”).    

Now it gets really interesting.  Randall documented a 2.4 Richter underground seismic earthquake that struck the area on July 7th, the day following the attack.  The station, Randall said, obtained the HAARP  magnetometer readings for a two-day period of the attack and its aftermath and posted these on its website as well.   

“Both the electronic attack and the unusual earthquake were accompanied by massive, anomalous bursts of electromagnetic pulse energy from HAARP, the U.S. Navy's electromagnetic pulse military facility and possible environmental weapons system in Gakona, Alaska. HAARP's magnetometer showed massive spikes of electromagnetic energy for both days.

‘According to Randall, " At about 10:45 AM Friday [July 6], radio station WJKM and CMR (Country Music Radio), with studios in Hartsville, Tennessee was knocked off the air by a very powerful strange energy blast! There was a crystal clear blue sky, no clouds or rain. It was not lightning" 

‘According to WJKM, in the attack, "All the radio station's lines were knocked out. Several power transformers were blown several blocks away from the studios (smoke seen billowing out of one). All phone lines at the newspaper (The Hartsville Vidette), the local farm co-op and all other phones in this small radius were knocked out.  Radio station transmitter lost all MOSFETS and the output - tuning network. All computers at WJKM lost motherboards, network cards etc. ISDN was knocked out. Most all the equipment Zephyr codec and EAS all knocked out." 

What the devil happened in Hartsville?  Webre, who claims to have discussed the matter with an assistant defense secretary at the Pentagon, who confirmed that such weapons were operational, speculates: 

‘These effects on radio transmission systems closely resemble the effects on urban radio, television, power transmission and generation facilities attacked by U.S. Air Force electronic bombing in electronic warfare missions in recent military operations worldwide, including Yugoslavia and Iraq. 

‘Electronic weapons with this capability are known, and can be land mounted in a facility like the former power plant, mounted in portable facilities like vans, trucks, helicopters or airplanes.
Electronic weapons may even be space-based, on satellite platforms. 

‘An alternative electronic warfare delivery system may involve newly constructed relays for the HAARP installation in Alaska. The close resemblance of the Hartsville attack to other U.S. Air Force electronic warfare led to speculation that radio station WJKM may have been chosen as a test target for a clandestine electronic warfare unit located within the power facility, or to which the power facility serves as electronic relay point. The likelihood that the electronic attack was accidental, rather than an intentional military test, is low, given that the targets were media outlets.”  

While HAARP is certainly real, the possibility that it was used in a war game experiment to shut down the communications systems of radio and newspaper in this Tennessee town is hard to swallow.  Except of course that, as Webre points out, ‘The U.S. military has a long history of secretly testing weapons on its unsuspecting civilian population, a practice that is illegal.’  

And this: numerous witnesses spoke of seeing troops in black uniforms with ‘light blue patches,’ and the letters ‘U.N.’ on military vehicles license plates.  What Webre didn’t know –– because it hadn’t happened yet –– was that the identical uniforms and ‘U.N.’ plates would be later seen in Haiti during the military sweep against supporters of ousted President Aristide when the U.S. drove him from power.  

HAARP is certainly real.  Whether it’s being used already against U.S. citizens is not known, but that’s part of its horror: it’s a weapon which in some applications might as well be invisible because the victims can’t be sure where it came from or even what it is.  Welcome, my friends, to the New World Order.  

Forget the birther stuff. The real scandal yet to be discovered about the President is: he’s white.

How else can we explain the man’s policies?

Would a black man escalate the phony ‘war on drugs’ which imprisons blacks by a factor more than 400% greater than their drug use when compared to whites?

Would a black man order the bombings of people of color around the world and disregard persistent ‘accidents’ which murder noncombatants?

Would a black man force the continued incarceration in Guantanamo and elsewhere of people he knows to be innocent?

Even some Republicans think there’s something wrong here. Rick Santorum, once-deceased former Pennsylvania Senator and newly anointed G.O.P. front-runner, said on a Christian TV station that “I find it remarkable for a black man to say ‘now we are going to decide who are people and who are not people.’”

In the words of Steve Jobs, “Oh, wow.”

Santorum, sadly, as is his habit, missed the obvious: Obama’s not black. Only a white person would decide who’s a person and who’s not. Look at the Supreme Court. According to them, corporations are people. Would a black person think that way? Of course not. It takes a special kind of stupidity, one quite rare among blacks.

Maybe it’s time to face the truth about all of this. Most politically well-known people supposed to be black are actually white. If they name an oil tanker after you, you are white. If you are nominated to the Supreme Court by a Republican President, you are white.

The people who own oil tankers and Presidents do not like black people. They know that black people can see through them. If Barack Obama were really black, do you suppose that Goldman Sachs would have handed him more than a million dollars in campaign contributions –– the largest ever –– in 2008? Don’t be ridiculous.

That’s likely the secret Obama’s been keeping. He’s done a masterful job covering it up, even hanging out with that incendiary preacher, but truth will out. Ever see his college records? No, you haven’t. Want to know why? Obviously, they say he’s ‘caucasian.’

Once the truth about his race emerges, the ballgame’s gonna be over. Nobody I know would put up with the shit he’s pulling if he was white.

When I was very young and didn’t know any better, I was a liberal. There are worse things, I grant you. I knew people who were conservatives, or thought they were. Most of these were not actually ideological; they were either scared of black people or scared of their parents, in some cases both.

I gave up liberal around age 18 when I discovered that the liberals couldn’t be trusted when push came to shove. Clark Kerr, President of the U.C. system in 1964, was a liberal. Hubert Humphrey, who traded his testicles for the vice presidency and became an enthusiastic promoter for the Viet Nam war, was a liberal.

Bob Kennedy was never a liberal. He began his political life slightly right of center, headed left and kept on going; he didn’t stop at liberal. He didn’t trust them.

Liberals liked to hold meetings but not actually do anything. They also had rather be right than win, something I kept jamming my head against in local politics in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s before giving up.

William Jefferson Clinton, Bill to his friends, is a liberal, albeit a ‘neoliberal’, a term I confess I’ve never understood. He invited black people to White House while cutting the hell out of public assistance and instituting a kind of feudal notion called ‘workfare’, which destroyed lives.

Clinton liberalism is not the same as the kind which wastes everybody’s time with self-indulgent, self-congratulatory meetings where any possible political action is postponed while participants argue about how to ensure precisely equal representation for both genders and all ages and races on any subcommittee yet to be formed. Clinton’s is the kind where they’re with you all the way except at some point there will have to be a sacrifice of principles in order to elect some horse’s rectum to high office.

I have little use for conservatives, either. The last one I thought was worth a damn was Barry Goldwater. Barry was, evidently, a brickhead, but he was an honest and sincere brickhead. He did not come up with someone else’s ideas in order to win votes. Before him was, arguably, Everett Dirksen, Senate minority leader from Illinois. Before Dirksen, Robert Taft of Ohio.

What you’re looking at today, these are not conservatives, although Ron Paul might fit in some respects. The rest of the modern-day grab bag consists of cretins and demagogues. It’s a sorry state of affairs when ignoramuses like Bachmann and Santorum claim the mantle.

It wasn’t always thus. Even William F. Buckley, a deeply insecure pseudo-intellectual and pretentious creep, was willing to debate ideas, a bravery he exhibited in 1973 in debating Germaine Greer before a wild crowd at Oxford. She beat the crap out of him, a happenstance I recall thoroughly enjoying as a TV viewer, but in retrospect his arguments, while somewhat shallow, are near brilliant when compared to the state of ‘conservative’ thought today.

It’s really the end of ideology, at least in the sense that it’s been described, detailed, proclaimed and fought for over the past five hundred years. Gone and done. Classic liberalism, like classic conservatism, meant something at one point, but each has devolved to mere sloganeering and rhetorical targets in the West’s 21st century. In fact, so bankrupt are they that there is actually a movement of sorts in the United States which seeks to advance a ‘middle ground’ between them, although there can be no middle ground between two muddled, inarticulate viewpoints, neither of which stands for a damned thing.

The old spectrum was trouble anyhow, since ‘moderate’ often meant ignorant or uncaring and the extremes of left and right more than occasionally ran across one another on common ground. But at least there were definitions you could almost trust. Not any longer.

Are we ‘beyond ideology’ or just lost and corrupted? It doesn’t actually matter. We have not liberal and conservative but Inside and Outside, the corrupt and the powerless. Hunter Thompson used the terms ‘Screwheads’ and ‘the Doomed.’ You can guess which is which.

It’s late. The Iowa results are no doubt in but I haven’t seen them. None of the news sources I get bulletins from have dispatched commentary. Maybe they’re too busy trying to figure things out. I wrote about it already and will probably have nothing to add. The nutbuckets are indeed loose, but the tidal shifts on the way will have little to do with any of them. And on the way they indeed are.

Rick Santorum. Caught his act, finally. What I get for switching on Amy Goodman first thing on waking. Got to learn to restrain myself. Mental health is too precious to risk it before getting out of bed. Plenty of opportunities to invite craziness in everyday life without this guy before breakfast.

The nutbuckets are loose in Iowa, site of the first caucuses. There have been, I am informed and believe and thereon allege, thirteen debates already, or maybe seventeen, and with the array of clowns vying for high office I’m sure it’s been a terrific show, but now it’s time to get serious.

Some of these useless hacks will be gone after Iowa. Seems kind of unfair in a way, doesn’t it? One lousy state and half of them will be sent packing. What if the first primary or caucus was in Montana instead? Or Oregon? Or Alabama?

The rise of Rick Santorum. Got to be over the cliff, don’t you think? Here’s a guy who thinks that homosexuality is the most important issue facing America, and also that gay sex is the equivalent of bestiality, which is pretty revealing about his own sexuality, which we won’t get into here. He’s entitled as an American to entertain whatever fantasies turn him on, including, I suspect, getting cornholed by a bull elephant, and anyhow this is a family webLog and we have limits.

According to the overpaid news shills, the G.O.P. ‘frontrunner’ has been, over the past few months, Romney, Perry, Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, and Spiro Agnew. They never say that Ron Paul is leading, presumably because their corporate bosses are as terrified of him as Obama is, a wild card who says all sorts of loony things and thus appeals to a lot of voters sick of the tired old shit.

Paul could actually win in Iowa. It’s not likely, though, because over the past week the media have unearthed some statements which appeared in something called ‘The Ron Paul Newsletter’ twenty years ago which contain overtly racist themes. Paul’s appeal to crossover Democrats who’ve had it with the President, and to independents, was frightening people and had to be stopped, if possible.

As we all know, racism in the Republican Party is not limited to one candidate or faction. Santorum, for example, says that he wants to eliminate ‘entitlement’ programs not to punish black people but to help them learn to take care of themselves, which is the sort of comment one might respond to appropriately with the business end of a baseball bat but for the probability that there’s nothing inside his cranium which could be damaged anyhow.

Paul, however. In his advocacy that the war on drugs be ended, he repeatedly notes that while 14% of drug users are black, one-third of those arrested are, and 60% of those incarcerated are black. You don’t hear those references from any other candidate, including Barack Obama, whose Justice Department is busy going after medical marijuana dispensaries.

I’m not saying I’d vote for Paul, not at this point. He’s clearly wrong on a number of significant issues. But I’m amused that he’s scaring everybody else, including the fraud we elected back in 2008. Obama could use a good scare. After trying for three years to rationalize his increasingly offensive policies and behavior, I’ve reached the conclusion that only if someone’s literally got a gun to his head does he have a legitimate reason for what he’s doing, and even then I’m not so sure.

On matters of real import to the country’s survival, matters of war, torture, assassination, munitions, warrantless wiretapping, detention and incarceration without due process or trial, not to mention freedom of speech and of assembly, Obama’s wrong on every count and Ron Paul is right.

This story won’t be over with Iowa, whether Paul wins or loses. The field will probably be narrowed a bit and we’ll have a couple more mental and emotional nutbuckets head on home, but Ron Paul will continue, and he will remain a problem for all the rest of them, the empire-builders and fake patriots.

As much of an annoyance as he is for fellow Republicans, Paul’s presence in the race is an increasing problem for the President.

So long as he’s facing off with dim bulbs like Romney, Obama looks almost human. Smart, good-looking, articulate, the President can cause people to forget the dead bodies all over Pakistan and elsewhere courtesy of his drones, so long as his opponent is some white guy yammering about nothing. It’s Paul who brings the wars into the room, reminds people that the Bill of Rights is almost in the shredder thanks to the change we could believe in, and connects the dots between Wall Street and the chief executive.

Probably, Iowa will finish off the Minnesota nitwit, Michele Bachmann. She will shortly go home where she and her husband can resume saving gays from themselves. Newt Gingrich will probably stick around for a few more weeks, hoping that lightning strikes his main opponents dead; his presence as the ‘intellectual’ of the group has had its hilarious moments but it’s time to say goodbye. He, too, will return home, in his case to wife number five or whatever she is, to whom he will lie like a rug while cultivating future wife number six and preaching about moral values at $10,000.00 a pop.

Rick Perry ought to leave the race, too, but he probably won’t because he’s raised a lot of money and so long as cretins on this level have the bread they tend to stick around for the warped ego satisfaction of it.

As Matt Taibbi so eloquently points out in his Iowa piece in Rolling Stone, it doesn’t matter anyhow. The whole thing’s a charade because, in the end, the system will not permit anyone of moral consequence or programmatic disagreement to become a real candidate, which means that Ron Paul has or shortly will be effectively Kuciniched, a process in which the nation’s media, knowing who pays the bills, makes real candidates disappear.

You’ve noticed, I’m sure, that while horses’ asses like Perry and even Herman Cain spit up on themselves and say things so screechingly stupid you want to yank their tongues out of their heads, the mainstream media pretends they are worthy of air time and even serious consideration. Meanwhile, most people don’t even know that the two-term mayor of Salt Lake City, Rocky Anderson, has launched a new ‘third’ party which challenges both Obama and the G.O.P. on actual substantive issues.

As for poor Ron Paul, even when polls indicate he has a shot at winning Iowa, the media treats him like a grease spot on the radar screen. And the hit squads have been loosed, too, digging up admittedly racist junk from a newsletter which was put out over his name some twenty or more years ago. The fact that of the Republican candidates, Paul is probably the least racist of all is not part of the conversation. In fact, it is Paul, not anyone else, certainly not the hypocrite in the White House, who points out that blacks suffer in wildly disproportionate number from the nation’s failed drug policies, as well as from imposition of the death penalty in capital crimes.

The reality is that the American two-party system is, as Anderson points out, a one-party system with two wings. Given the closed nature of the thing, with debates limited to the Democratic and Republican nominees only, with media attention focused on these two clowns to the exclusion of other potentially serious challengers, with all the money going to the pair of anointed puppets, ballot access limited everywhere for anyone else, there are no practical alternatives.

What will be interesting in this year of pseudo elections is the response from a growing number of Americans unhappy with how it is certain to be shaped. It’s not just the Tea Party and the OWS demonstrators, as Obama and the Democratic ‘leadership’ is going to find out. There is a deep and growing sense of really crazy anger. You can see it on the web sites and in the threads and commentary, how it’s changed over the past few years. These people have nowhere to go and they are not going to accept that.

How it will play out, I don’t know. Apparently, the Anderson campaign is not going to make the California ballot, which is a shame because he would’ve given Obama a really good scare out here. He may do that elsewhere. It’s probably impossible to keep him off every state’s ballot. Paul could run as an independent or seek the Libertarian nomination; he’d cause problems for both parties, especially if the G.O.P. picks Romney.

There are other folks even further removed, Buddy Roemer, a right-wing former Democrat or a left-wing former Republican who is wrong about nearly everything but is against the damned wars, which is big if you care about all of those dead bodies on Obama’s doorstep. And how about Jesse Ventura, a Wall Street nightmare if I’ve ever seen one, who would run on Paul’s ticket if asked, and who still wants to go after the bastards who killed the Kennedys even if they’re dead.

Many years ago, a friend of mine expressed amazement at the popularity of the National Enquirer. Clearly, its stories were ridiculous. Two-headed babies, men from Mars. But, see, that’s what happens when the reading public figures out that the same level of ‘truth’ is in the New York Times, only the Enquirer has more lurid stories and bigger photos.

I suspect that’s also what happens in politics when the voting public figures out that you get the same level of sanity from Ron Paul that you do from Obama, only Paul is saying what he really believes and Obama‘s lying his ass off. I hope the sucker wins in Iowa. Let’s at least have some fun.

It’s inevitable that politicians get isolated, especially the ones in the rarified atmosphere of big time politics. Their lives are necessarily centered around the work and, to whatever degree, the benefits available to such lofty personages. They rely on their staff to brief them, steer their attention to the things they may need to see.

There are also the permanent distractions of fund raising and other non-policy matters. When Barack Obama flies to New York for a dinner at which the guests have paid $35,000.00 each, he is not in a position of learning how the Occupy demonstrators are feeling that evening.

For at least a year, it’s been apparent out here in the real world that the President was skating on thin ice. While his advisers fill his ears with reassuring platitudes, his base has been slipping away a bit at a time. He is under the impression –– because it’s how national politics has almost always worked –– that he has relatively little to fear from this erosion. The ‘left’, after all, has nowhere to go.

It’s a pretty rational approach, ordinarily. Those who are angry over one thing or another are not going to vote for Romney, let alone the other plague carriers in the Republican primary race. Obama and the Democratic Party high command are familiar with history and the thousands of field studies and whatnot which tell them that voters will still vote, nonvoters will stay home, and his rightward lurch will not cost him enough to worry about it.

The party itself, an empty shell ever since Bill Clinton finished off the progressives, is already campaigning as though the past three years did not actually happen but, if they did, everything was the fault of those Republican ‘obstructionists.’

Any suggestion that loyalists might bolt to a third party or rogue candidate brings shouts of ‘Ralph Nader,’ the utterly false claim that Nader’s candidacy cost Gore and the party victory in 2000. The party mouthpieces evidently believe that the cry will protect them from that sort of defection in 2012.

That’s what I mean about isolation.

The party leaders talk among themselves. They talk to journalists, although most journalists are really just hacks now since the major media outlets are uninterested in real news and information. Washington talks to Washington.

Meanwhile, Congress’ approval rating has fallen into the single digits. That ought to have awakened someone but I don’t believe it has. Obama thinks he can run against Congress. See ‘obstructionists,’ supra.

None of those useless bastards has the vaguest idea what’s happening out here but they might well have it dropped like a drug-crazed ferret down their collective pants in 2012. People are now more than the usual pissed off.

The debate, you see, is no longer between Democrats and Republicans, between soulless creeps like Mitt Romney and the Newt and ball-less embarrassments like Obama and Harry the Horse Reid. There is a growing segment of this culture which puts all of these people in the same box now, and they are preparing to push the suckers off a cliff.

I spend time reading the message boards, not only on Alternet’s stories and Reader Supported News, but on presumably more reserved locales such as Salon.com. Today, there was the usual debate about Obama. What I am noticing –– and what I very much doubt Obama’s people are noticing –– is that those who defend him and urge the defeat of Republicans as a solution to the national malaise are losing their voices; they are falling back. And the voices of change, the voices of people infuriated, are getting louder and more confident.

Today, in response to a couple of Obama defenders, a personage manifestly channeling Hunter S. Thompson, offered a classic, stunning, edge of the planet response. I am excising his name. Otherwise, here it is, unexpurgated:

(To) CONSERVATIVESLAYER (who wrote): Well the occupiers will be happy when Mitt Romney is president. I'm sure he'll be very receptive to their wishes, not. Talk about stupid.

“No, the real stupidity stems from way too many distracted and dumbed-down fin-clapping voter-drone "Orp! Orp" bleating seals doing what Dear Leader ordered and instructed them to do: to knuckle under, move forward, stop litigating the past like a bunch of cookie-cuttered Good Germans, know their serf role and serf station in life, pluck out their spinal columns, hold their beaks, and cast yet another enabling and rewarding vote for spineless, feckless, gormless millionaire house wigger Dimbulbacrats under the illusion that they are somehow auto-magically better than plantation master Rethuglicans for 30 more persistently vegetative years....”

(To) TAILWIND (who wrote): Romney has the same destructive policies that brought on the recession and mess we are trying to get out of. He and his ilk are the problem.

“Bullshit -- Romney and all the big ultra-scary double super-duper background secret magitastical ReThuglican terrorists and their Bible-beating Tali-Born Again are *NOT* comic book mega-villains with supercalifragglerock mystic powers. They are fallible human beings no special or different than your god damned mail man or car mechanic, and thus in no way shape or form can their destructive policies ever become commonplace to do their damage without ... *ding* *ding* *ding* ... enough rewarding, enabling, and shielding millionaire DLC/Third Way house wigger Hockacrats on board who believe with every sociopathic fibre of their being that their pampered and sheltered Ever-Quest lives are infinitely more important than your smelly ol' drab and predictable welfare riddled lives, and their over-privileged snot-nosed children and high-maintenence fugly-assed wives are more deserving and entitled than you and yours, and casting their votes accordingly ... Period.

“Such rich well-to-do fence jockey asshole Dimbulbacrats are not ready to make nice with you -- never was and never will be -- because their give-a-damn is permanently and irrevocably busted, has always been busted since Saint Rawnie Ray Gun, and its in their best economic interests to keep it busted by continuing to hock, pawn, or stick a prison shiv directly in their conscience while relying on the Israelization of law enforcement to herd and corall your Palestinian ass by hook, crook, nightstick, or pepper spray.

“Eventually, it has to make you wonder what kind of enabling and rewarding motherfucker dares to continue providing such crooked sonsabitches with continued gainful employment for 3 days let alone 30 years until you end up finding that aforementioned motherfucker either on MSNBC's payroll or the nearest mirror. Sometimes both. And what's even more sad and ironic is your well-worn excuses of "Obama sure is bad, but a Republican president would be auto-magically worse!" literally requires the same band of rewarding and enabling house-wigger Democrats to prove you right with their held snotlockers, retarded votes, moral cowardice, and ethical paralysis ...”

Pretty much over the side, wouldn’t you say? Even crazier than what I write from time to time. But, folks, it is not that unusual anymore. People are losing it. They are jumping off the two-party ship. They’ve had all they can take. And to paraphrase a sweet old expression, hell hath no fury like a voting populace scorned. Don’t blame it on Ralph Nader, or for that matter any of this year’s sudden or predictable alternatives. Put the blame where it belongs.