Bush turning intelligence agencies on Americans

Nick Juliano's essay in Raw Story shows how perilous it has been for the citizens of the U.S. to overlook the danger of having Cheney and Bush in charge and still operating at full throttle until January 2009. The question lingers in the heavy August night - why would Cheney/Bush want to increase the latitude of the office of the Presidency in secrecy matters now if they may be replaced in the next election by someone from the other party? Thomas Frank's new book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, addresses this concern about the integrity of the Right-Wing Wrecking Crew as well as the history leading up to the purposive ruination of the American infrastructure and economy and abolition of the liberal ideals such as the "common good" and the "general welfare." I intend to write about this tomorrow, but for today I believe Juliano's essay contains more than enough for us to start chewing on. (Emphasis marks are mine.) __________________________________________

Watchdog: Bush turning intelligence agencies on Americans Nick Juliano Thursday July 31, 2008 President Bush seems to be slowly turning the nation's massive surveillance apparatus upon its citizens, and some worry that administration assurances to protect civil liberties are nothing but empty promises. With his update to a decades-old executive order governing the Intelligence Community, Bush is giving the Director of National Intelligence and the 16 agencies of the US Intelligence Community more power to access and share sensitive information on Americans with little to no independent oversight. The update to Executive Order 12333, first issued by former President Ronald Reagan, introduces a more prominent role for the Attorney General in approving intelligence gathering methods, calls for collaboration with local law enforcement agencies, eases limits on how information can be shared and urges cooperation between the IC and private companies. "This Intelligence Community that was built to deal with foreign threats is now being slowly and incrementally turned inward," says Mike German, policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, in an interview with RAW STORY. Bush's latest update of a decades old executive order governing intelligence activities is a "lit fuse" that could end with the Constitution's immolation, another ACLU official says. "This kind of concentrated power, exercised in secret, is a lit fuse with our Constitution likely in danger of being burned,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington legislative office. The White House insists that the update to Executive Order 12333 maintains protections for Americans' civil liberties, but senior administration officials who briefed reporters Thursday provided little reassurance that the new order would correct some of the Bush administration's most egregious abuses. Asked about Bush's decision to authorize warrantless wiretaps of Americans -- despite existing privacy protections in the executive order -- the unidentified official offered a non-sequitur and refused to discuss the program in detail, according to a transcript of the call. Q: All right. On the matter of civil liberties, I think one of the concerns that you're going to hear is, you know, the terrorist surveillance program or the warrantless wiretapping program went on despite the civil liberties protections. So what do you have to say to folks that say, you know, essentially nice that you have this stuff in the executive order but it doesn't necessarily mean anything when the president gets it into his mind that he needs or wants to do something that some people would find outside of those bounds? SR. ADM. OFFICIAL: I think what we would say to that is that the executive order reaffirms the nation's long-standing commitment to protecting civil liberties. It maintains all of the protections that are in place to do so, plus all procedures have to be approved by the attorney general. With respect to the terrorist surveillance program, I'm really not going to speak in any detail to that. The administration has spoken to it previously. I'd observe that - I'm going to leave it at that on that question. An administration official also assured reporters that the amended order "makes clear, as did the original order, that all statutes have to be complied with when the intelligence community is undertaking activities governed by specific statutes." Of course, that's precisely what did not happen with regard to the warrantless wiretapping program, which was conducted outside the bounds of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. ACLU policy counsel German further noted the previous disclosure of a Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion that presidents are not even bound by executive orders in the first place: "Rather than violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it," Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse revealed the office had argued. "If that's still the position of the Department of Justice, then this entire exercise is meaningless," German told RAW STORY. "This all could be voided by presidential fiat without even amending what's written now." Bush authorized the extra-statutory warrantless surveillance in part based on an exceptionally broad reading of the extent of his executive power and by arguing that Congress's pre-Iraq War resolution expanded his power even further. The updated order apparently does nothing to eliminate those views of expansive power. Q: Hi. I have a question about the provision saying all the undertaking would have to be governed by statute where there is a statute. Is that a step back from previous assertions that, you know, the authorization of use of military force gave a more broad authority to the president? SR. ADM. OFFICIAL: No, I don't think so. The point that -- I don't believe so at all -- I think the point that we're trying to make there is when there is a specific statute that governs a particular activity, for example, you know, the collection of certain business records or financial records, or the conduct of electronic surveillance, the Congress, as many of you know, has put in place various statutes, some of them quite elaborate, to govern the conduct of those activities. And the intelligence community, when engaged in such activity, has to fully comply with those statutes. I don't believe there's any change at all on that front. Executive Order 12333, which lays out the responsibilities of each of the 16 agencies, maintains the decades-old prohibitions on assassination and using unwitting human subjects for scientific experiments. The CIA notoriously tested LSD on human subjects in the 1950s, which was revealed by a Senate investigation in 1977. The new order gives the national intelligence director, a position created in 2005, new authority over any intelligence information collected that pertains to more than one agency -- an attempt to force greater information exchange among agencies traditionally reluctant to share their most prized intelligence. The order directs the attorney general to develop guidelines to allow agencies access to information held by other agencies. That could potentially include the sharing of sensitive information about Americans. The order has been under revision for more than a year, an attempt to update a nearly 30-year-old presidential order to reflect organizational changes made in the intelligence agencies after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. German noted the update's insertion of provisions related to Intelligence Community cooperation with "state, local and tribal governments," which he says has troubling implications in light of the ACLU's recent examination of government fusion centers, creating the potential for "no rules" intelligence sharing among various agencies. The update, he says, also removes limits on the National Security Agency's ability to share with other intelligence entities the information it collects before determining whether it is legally allowed to keep such information itself. The update also carves out a larger role in intelligence gathering for the "private sector," an addition that takes on new interest in light of Bush's unflinching demand for legal immunity to the telecommunications companies that facilitated his warrantless wiretapping program. Congress granted that immunity in its FISA update, which he signed into law earlier this month, essentially invalidating dozens of lawsuits against companies like AT&T and Verizon. The senior administration official said the FISA update was one of the reasons Bush was updating the executive order. "If the Intelligence Community is acting to further the interest of AT&T," German said, "then maybe we better understand why AT&T cooperated in the warrantless wiretapping program."

Suzan _____________________________________

Prince Charles Warns Against GM Food Genetic Contamination

After watching the interview of Benjamin Fulford by Project Camelot, this is all I need to ensure a very disturbed day. I don't believe that Prince Charles has been misinformed by Friends of the Earth, the Soil Association, et al. And how are these scientists so sure? There are enormous consequences to getting this wrong and GM is on the wrong track for our future well being. Listen to his angst-ridden plea below! (Emphasis marks are mine.)

The Prince of Wales has been plunged into an extraordinary row with scientists after they accused him of seriously abusing his position over his comments on GM food. Prince Charles sparks debate over GM crops claims Prince Charles warns GM crops risk causing biggest-ever environmental disaster The Prince of Wales: 'If that is the future, count me out' Hear the Prince's passionate outburst. (13 Aug 08 - Prince Charles responds to a question from Jeff Randall about wanting to turn the farming clock back during an exclusive interview) Scientists reacted angrily to the warning from the Prince in his interview in the Daily Telegraph that GM crops risked causing the world's worse environmental disaster. MPs accused him of being a "luddite" who risked inflicting starvation on millions of people in Africa. But the Prince will be heartened by the revelation that there is now only one GM trial ongoing in Britain - in Cambridgeshire - and there are no plans to licence any more. Some 54 have been conducted since they were approved by the government in 2000. Prof Ottoline Leyser, a plant geneticist at the University of York who is a Fellow of the Royal Society, said: "I am disappointed with the whole environmental movement. "This is rabid anti GM. Misguidedly demonising GM results in the real issues being sidelined, creating the very problems that Prince Charles is trying to address. "There are several issues that have been muddled together, resulting in serious dangers to the future direction of agriculture. "He has confused the dominance of multinational companies and its consequences for food security with the use GM in agriculture. If there were a total world ban on GM tomorrow, it would have no effect at all on the dominance on big multinational companies." GM trials given approval in the UK Johnjoe McFadden, professor of molecular genetics at the University of Surrey, said: "Prince Charles is talking biased baloney. "Prince Charles, like many wealthy people, has no concept of the hardships of other parts of the world. He wants to retain his vision of a rural idyll by telling the poor to eat organic cake while he pours wine into the fuel tank of his sports car. "He is using the privileged position of a prince of the realm to try to influence us with a one sided, irresponsible, view of food technology. He is like a romantic 19th century poet writing and painting pictures of rural life. "Environmentalists have been saying for years all we need to do is redistribute wealth to feed the poor. It has not happened so we have to produce more food. The most effective way is through GM crops." Professor Alison Smith, senior researcher at John Innes Centre, Europe's premier plant science laboratory, said: "I was shocked and saddened to read what Prince Charles said. Shocked because it was so ill-informed, one-sided and generally negative. "Saddened because the Prince is in a position to lead this country in solving some of the massive problems he identifies. He could bring together our world-class scientists and agricultural experts to catalyse constructive debate and action that would benefit the UK and the rest of the planet. "Instead, he indulges in diatribes in which he appears to blame the problems of the planet on a single technological advance that he has completely misunderstood." The Prince, in the Daily Telegraph, challenged the view that GM foods will be crucial to the developing world. He said: "What we should be talking about is food security, not food production - that is what matters and that is what people will not understand." But the Royal Society, in a statement said: "Food security is an important issue. We do need to evaluate a range of techniques and technologies which have been proposed for enhancing food-crop production and the Royal Society is currently undertaking a study looking at this." In his interview the Prince accused large corporations of conducting experiments with nature, which had "gone seriously wrong". He was backed by Patrick Holden from the Soil Association who said: "If we go down this path I think we will put this country at risk. There could be a period of great difficulty in the next 10 or 20 years." Mike Childs, campaign director for Friends of the Earth, said: "GM crops will not solve the food crisis - and forging ahead with an industrialised farming system will continue to fail people and the environment around the world. Des Turner, a Labour MP on the Commons science committee, said: "Prince Charles has got a way of getting things absolutely wrong. It's an entirely Luddite attitude to simply reject them out of hand." Phil Willis, the chairman of the Commons science committee, said the Prince's "lack of scientific understanding" would "condemn millions of people to starvation in areas like sub-Saharan Africa".

Suzan

Ivins Not Guilty! (No Real Evidence)

So, the FBI admits that it has no evidence (other than the same circumstantial type that they had against Hatfill (to whom they paid over 5 million dollars in damages for falsely persecuting him)) that Bruce Ivins was involved in the manufacture and sending of anthrax through the mail, most critically to Congressional leaders (Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy) and other disparagers of the Cheney/Bush Patriot Act, which was on the fast (Rethuglican) track to passage right after and in response to the 9/11 attack, and that he actually had no way to accomplish that highly technical task at all. Yes, I'm jumping ahead of the story, but it looks like it could only have been achieved by the concerted effort of a tightly guided team in circumstances that were not able to be monitored by outsiders. So much evidence (and damning DNA evidence to boot!), so little time. But, maybe not. The Weshington Post (of all government-friendly sources) ran the following article today. (Emphasis marks are mine.)

Hair Samples in Anthrax Case Don't Match Strands From Mailbox in Princeton Are Not From Ivins, Investigators Say By Carrie Johnson Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, August 14, 2008; A02 Federal investigators probing the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks recovered samples of human hair from a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., but the strands did not match the lead suspect in the case, according to sources briefed on the probe. FBI agents and U.S. Postal Service inspectors analyzed the data in an effort to place Fort Detrick, Md., scientist Bruce E. Ivins at the mailbox from which bacteria-laden letters were sent to Senate offices and media organizations, the sources said. The hair sample is one of many pieces of evidence over which researchers continue to puzzle in the case, which ended after Ivins committed suicide July 29 as prosecutors prepared to seek his indictment. Authorities released sworn statements and search warrants last week at a news conference in which they asserted that Ivins was their sole suspect. But the materials have not dampened speculation about the merits of the investigative findings and the government's aggressive pursuit of Ivins, a 62-year-old anthrax vaccine researcher. Conspiracy theories have flourished since the 2001 attacks, which killed five people and sickened 17 others. Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee announced it will call FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to appear at an oversight hearing Sept. 17, when he is likely to be asked about the strength of the government's case against Ivins. A spokeswoman for Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), a vocal FBI critic, said he would demand more information about how authorities narrowed their search. The House Judiciary panel, meanwhile, is negotiating to hold a separate oversight hearing in September with bureau officials, in a session that could mark the first public occasion in which Mueller faces questions about the FBI's handling of the anthrax case. Friends and former colleagues of Ivins, who died before he could see the full array of evidence prosecutors had gathered, continue to demand information about the DNA advances that authorities say led them to a flask in Ivins's lab. Defense lawyer Paul F. Kemp yesterday said he wonders "where Ivins could have possibly stored this anthrax without any employees seeing it, or if he took it home, why there was no trace" of the deadly spores, despite repeated FBI searches over the past two years of Ivins's car, his work locker, a safe-deposit box and his house. Meanwhile, government sources offered more detail about Ivins's movements on a critical day in the case: when letters were dropped into the postal box on Princeton's Nassau Street, across the street from the university campus. Investigators now believe that Ivins waited until evening to make the drive to Princeton on Sept. 17, 2001. He showed up at work that day and stayed briefly, then took several hours of administrative leave from the lab, according to partial work logs. Based on information from receipts and interviews, authorities say Ivins filled up his car's gas tank, attended a meeting outside of the office in the late afternoon, and returned to the lab for a few minutes that evening before moving off the radar screen and presumably driving overnight to Princeton. The letters were postmarked Sept. 18. Nearly seven years after the incidents, however, investigators have come up dry in their efforts to find direct evidence to place Ivins at the Nassau Street mailbox in September and October 2001.

Richard Spertzel (head of the biological-weapons section of Unscom from 1994-99 and a member of the Iraq Survey Group) had already reported in his Wall Street Journal essay ("Thank you, Rupert!) on August 5 that Ivins did not have "the equipment to make such a product" at his institute.

Over the past week the media was gripped by the news that the FBI was about to charge Bruce Ivins, a leading anthrax expert, as the man responsible for the anthrax letter attacks in September/October 2001. But despite the seemingly powerful narrative that Ivins committed suicide because investigators were closing in, this is still far from a shut case. The FBI needs to explain why it zeroed in on Ivins, how he could have made the anthrax mailed to lawmakers and the media, and how he (or anyone else) could have pulled off the attacks, acting alone. I believe this is another mistake in the investigation. Let's start with the anthrax in the letters to Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. The spores could not have been produced at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where Ivins worked, without many other people being aware of it. Furthermore, the equipment to make such a product does not exist at the institute. Information released by the FBI over the past seven years indicates a product of exceptional quality. The product contained essentially pure spores. The particle size was 1.5 to 3 microns in diameter. There are several methods used to produce anthrax that small. But most of them require milling the spores to a size small enough that it can be inhaled into the lower reaches of the lungs. In this case, however, the anthrax spores were not milled. What's more, they were also tailored to make them potentially more dangerous. According to a FBI news release from November 2001, the particles were coated by a "product not seen previously to be used in this fashion before." Apparently, the spores were coated with a polyglass which tightly bound hydrophilic silica to each particle. That's what was briefed (according to one of my former weapons inspectors at the United Nations Special Commission) by the FBI to the German Foreign Ministry at the time. Another FBI leak indicated that each particle was given a weak electric charge, thereby causing the particles to repel each other at the molecular level. This made it easier for the spores to float in the air, and increased their retention in the lungs. In short, the potential lethality of anthrax in this case far exceeds that of any powdered product found in the now extinct U.S. Biological Warfare Program. In meetings held on the cleanup of the anthrax spores in Washington, the product was described by an official at the Department of Homeland Security as "according to the Russian recipes" -- apparently referring to the use of the weak electric charge. The latest line of speculation asserts that the anthrax's DNA, obtained from some of the victims, initially led investigators to the laboratory where Ivins worked. But the FBI stated a few years ago that a complete DNA analysis was not helpful in identifying what laboratory might have made the product. Furthermore, the anthrax in this case, the "Ames strain," is one of the most common strains in the world. Early in the investigations, the FBI said it was similar to strains found in Haiti and Sri Lanka. The strain at the institute was isolated originally from an animal in west Texas and can be found from Texas to Montana following the old cattle trails. Samples of the strain were also supplied to at least eight laboratories including three foreign laboratories. Four French government laboratories reported on studies with the Ames strain, citing the Pasteur Institute in Paris as the source of the strain they used. Organism DNA is not a very reliable way to make a case against a scientist. The FBI has not officially released information on why it focused on Ivins, and whether he was about to be charged or arrested. And when the FBI does release this information, we should all remember that the case needs to be firmly based on solid information that would conclusively prove that a lone scientist could make such a sophisticated product. From what we know so far, Bruce Ivins, although potentially a brilliant scientist, was not that man. The multiple disciplines and technologies required to make the anthrax in this case do not exist at Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Inhalation studies are conducted at the institute, but they are done using liquid preparations, not powdered products. The FBI spent between 12 and 18 months trying "to reverse engineer" (make a replica of) the anthrax in the letters sent to Messrs. Daschle and Leahy without success, according to FBI news releases. So why should federal investigators or the news media or the American public believe that a lone scientist would be able to do so?

I don't usually mention individual comments, but several that accompanied the Washington Post article were so strikingly dead on that I can't help myself:

tperry1 wrote: Is Princeton one of Cheney's undisclosed locations? sfexpat2000 wrote: They can't even place him at the scene. So, let's be clear. Last week, they had him driving to Princeton for the 5pm window AND back in Frederick for a 4:XX pm appointment. This week, they have him driving in the night. Which was it? In 2003, the FBI had Hatfill's every minute mapped out around both mailings. What changed between now and then? properbostonian1 wrote: The DNA results of all FBI agents, officials and employees should be published on the web. clearthink wrote: "Close enough for government work?"

And did you notice how closely the MSM reported these most important developments? No? Neither did I and it's truly odd in light of how much airplay the original story of the anthrax got and the fear it instilled in the country. I guess no one is worried now about al Qaeda (or Iraqis) making complicated composites of and sending the anthrax through the mail today, especially since the Global War on Terror has increased their numbers and made them so much stronger. I'll follow that tortured tale for you tomorrow. It's almost odd (not funny) that they didn't think it important enough to cover contemporaneously, isn't it? Maybe we'll get something at the end of the month? Or right before the election? Oh well. I guess I'll have to fill in for them. Suzan ________________________________

Have the NeoCons Guaranteed US A Nuclear Attack or Just Economic Failure?

Who says you can't learn something new when you are old and over the hill? (Okay, I'm only kidding a little bit here.) Today I learned the following about the MSM's selling (and you thought it was only an oversight when the New York Times hired Bill Kristol to write serious editorials after his complete muffing (spelled "outright lying") of the rationale for the Iraq invasion?) of our past and future wars (from Antiwar.com):

1. Wolf Blitzer used to work for AIPAC. 2. He interviewed Tzipi Livni without sharing with the international audience any of her history (or his).

Of course, the international viewers knew (more or less) her background; it's just the naive (uninformed or "don't care") Americans who think she's merely a good example of smart (international) women lawyers finally getting ahead.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was interviewed on CNN's Late Edition by Wolf Blitzer, who himself once worked for AIPAC. Livni has an interesting resume. Her father was one of the Irgun terrorists who blew up the King David hotel in 1946 and later massacred Arab villagers in Deir Yassin. As a teenager, Livni participated in demonstrations on behalf of the nationalist extremist group Greater Israel, which advocated expelling all Arabs and extending Israeli domination over all of historic Palestine to include the West Bank, parts of Jordan, up to the Litani River in Lebanon to the north, and down to include Sinai and the Suez Canal in the south and west.

I humbly received this new-found, good-fairy's gift of knowledge by reading Paul Craig Roberts' dissection (published today) of what has really happened in the latest installment of hot war news between Georgia, Russia and the U.S., and it will not help you sleep well tonight, no matter what our leaders trumpet from the parapets. And Roberts (ex-stodgy economist and Ronald Reagan's Assistant Secretary of the Treasury) has jumped off the professional reporting cliff here as his passionate (profane/vulgar) language will keep you awake until the end of the essay if the facts inside it don't. But, please, read it yourself. It's an eye opener for those of us who fail to regularly read The Asia Times, et al. Oh, and don't miss the advice that Pravda feels free to give George W. Bush, President of the United States. (Also, do not miss the comments at the end - the knowledge shown there is almost unassailable - even the ones that are somewhat inaccurate are amazing in their comprehension of all the players' parts.) __________________________________________

Will American Insouciance Destroy the World? By Paul Craig Roberts 13/08/08 "ICH" --- - The neoconned Bush Regime and the Israeli-occupied American media are heading the innocent world toward nuclear war. Back in the Reagan years, the National Endowment for Democracy was created as a cold war tool. Today the NED is a neocon-controlled agent for US world hegemony. Its main function is to pour US money and election-rigging into former constituent parts of the Soviet Union in order to ring Russia with American puppet states. The neoconservative Bush Regime used the NED to intervene in Ukrainian and Georgian internal affairs in keeping with the neoconservative plan to establish US-friendly and Russia-hostile political regimes in these two former constituent parts of Russia and the Soviet Union. The NED was also used to dismember the former Yugoslavia with its interventions in Slovakia, Serbia, and Montenegro. According to Wikipedia, Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, told the Washington Post in 1991 that much of what the NED does “today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” The Bush Regime, having established a puppet, Mikhail Saakashvili, as president of Georgia, tried to bring Georgia into NATO. [For readers too young to know, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was a military alliance between the US and Western European countries to resist any Soviet move into Western Europe. There has been no reason for NATO since the Soviet Union’s internal political collapse almost two decades ago. The neocons turned NATO into another tool, like the NED, for US world hegemony. Subsequent US administrations violated the understandings that President Reagan had reached with Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, and have incorporated former parts of the Soviet empire into NATO. The neocon goal of ringing Russia with a hostile military alliance has been proclaimed many times.] Western European members of NATO balked at the admission of Georgia, as they understood it as a provocative affront to Russia, on whom Western Europe is dependent for natural gas. Western Europeans are also disturbed at the Bush Regime’s intentions to install ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic as the consequence will be Russian nuclear cruise missiles targeted on European capitals. Europeans don’t see the advantage of helping the US block Russian nuclear retaliation against the US at the expense of their own existence. Ballistic missile defenses are not useful against cruise missiles. Every country is tired of war except for the US. War, including nuclear war, is the neoconservative strategy for world hegemony. The entire world, except for Americans, knows that the outbreak of armed conflict between Russian and Georgian forces in South Ossetia was entirely due to the US and its Georgia puppet, Saakashvili. Americans, alone in the world, are unaware that the hostilities were initiated by Saakashvili, because Bush, Cheney and the Israeli-occupied American media have again lied to them. Everyone else in the world knows that the unstable and corrupt Saakashvili, who proclaims democracy and runs a police state, would not have taken on Russia by attacking South Ossetia unless given the go-ahead by Washington. The purpose of the Georgian attack on the Russian population of South Ossetia is twofold: To convince Europeans that their action in delaying Georgia’s NATO membership is the cause of “the Russian aggression” and that to save Georgia from conquest Georgia must be given NATO membership. To ethnically cleanse South Ossetia of its Russian population. Two thousand Russian civilians were targeted and killed by the US-equipped and trained Georgian Army, and tens of thousands fled into Russia. Having achieved this goal, Saakashvili and his puppet-masters in Washington quickly called for a cease fire and a halt to “the Russian invasion.” The hope is that the Russian population will be afraid to return or can be prevented from returning, thus removing the secessionist threat. No doubt the Bush Regime can con the insouciant American population, just as it did with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Iranian nukes, and 9/11 itself, but the rest of the world is not buying it, least of all Moscow, the Asia Times, and not even America’s bought-and-paid-for European allies. Writing in the Asia Times, Ambassador M. K. Bhadrakumar, a former career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service, notes the disinformation that is being peddled by the Bush Regime and the US media and reports that “at the outbreak of violence, Russia had tried to have the United Nations Security Council issue a statement calling on Georgia and South Ossetia to immediately lay down weapons. However, Washington was disinterested.” Amb. Bhadrakumar notes that the American and Georgian resort to violence and propaganda has brought an end to the Russian government’s belief that diplomacy and good will can bring about a settlement of the South Ossetia issue. If Russia wished, Russia could terminate Georgia’s existence as a separate country at will, and there is nothing the US could do about it. It is certain that the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia was a Bush Regime orchestrated event. The American media and the neocon think tanks were ready with their propaganda blitzes. Neocons had ready a Wall Street Journal editorial page article for Saakashvili that declares “the war in Georgia is a war for the West.” Faced with the collapse of his army when Russia sent in troops to protect South Ossetians from the Georgian troops, Saakashvili declared: “This is not about Georgia any more. It is about America, its values.” The neocon Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., quickly called a conference hosted by warmonger Ariel Cohen, “Urgent! Event: Russian-Georgian War: A Challenge for the U.S. and the World.” The Washington Post lifted its skirts and spread wide its legs to neocon Robert Kagen’s war drums, “Putin Makes His Move.” Only a fool like Kagen could think that if Putin intended to invade Georgia he would do so from Beijing, or that after sending the American-trained Georgian army in flight, he would not continue and conquer all of Georgia in order to put an end to American machinations on Russia’s most sensitive border, machinations that are likely to eventually end in nuclear war. That despicable whore, the New York Times, spread her legs for Billy Kristol’s rant, “Will Russia Get Away With It?” Kristol thunders against “dictatorial and aggressive and fanatical regimes” that “seem happy to work together to weaken the influence of the United States and its democratic allies.” Kristol presents a new axis of evil--Russia, China, North Korea and Iran--and warns against “delay and irresolution” that “simply invite future threats and graver dangers.” In other words, “attack Russia now.” Dick Cheney, the insane American Vice President telephoned Saakashvili to express US solidarity with Georgia in the conflict with Russia and declared: “Russian aggression must not go unanswered.” Cheney’s telephone call is like Great Britain’s “guarantee” to Poland against Nazi Germany. Only a complete idiot would tell Saakashvili anything other than “to cease immediately.” What must be the effect on US Intelligence services and the US military of Cheney’s propagandistic and irresponsible statement of US support for Georgia’s war crimes? Does anyone really believe that the CIA or any US intelligence service told the vice president that Russia opened the conflict with an invasion? Russian troops arrived in South Ossetia after thousands of Ossetians had been killed by the Georgian attack and after tens of thousands of Ossetians had fled into Russia to escape the Georgian attack. According to news reports, Russian forces have captured Americans who were with the Georgian troops directing their attack on civilians. The US military certainly has no resources for a war against Russia on top of lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a planned war with Iran. With its Georgian venture, the Bush Regime is guilty of a new round of war crimes. What will be the consequence? Many will reply that having got away with 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and with its preparations for attacking Iran, the Bush Regime will get away with its Georgian venture as well. Possibly, however, this time the Bush Regime has overreached. Certainly Russia now recognizes that the US is determined to exert hegemony over Russia and is Russia’s worst enemy. China realizes the US threat to its own energy supply and, thereby, economy. Even America’s European allies, chafing under their role of supplying troops for America’s Empire, must now realize that being an American ally is dangerous and has no benefits. If Georgia becomes a NATO member and renews its attack on South Ossetia, it must drag Europe into a war with Russia, a main supplier of energy to Europe. Moreover, if Russian troops are sent across European frontiers, there is nothing to stop them. What does America offer Europe, aside from the millions of dollars it pays to buy off Europe’s political leaders to insure that they betray their own peoples? Nothing whatsoever. The only military threat that Europe faces comes from being dragged into America’s wars for American hegemony. The US is financially bankrupt, with budget and trade deficits that exceed the combined deficits of the rest of the world together. The dollar has wilted. The American consumer market is dying from the offshoring of American jobs and, thereby, incomes, and from the wealth effect of the real estate and derivatives collapses. The US has nothing to offer Europe. Indeed, American economic decline is killing European exports by driving up the value of the euro. America long ago lost the moral high ground. Hypocrisy has become America’s best known hallmark. Bush, the invader of Afghanistan and Iraq on the basis of lies and deception, thunders at Russia for coming to the defense of its peacekeepers and Russian citizens in South Ossetia. Bush, the vampire who ripped Kosovo out of Serbia’s heart and handed it to the Muslims, has taken an adamant stand against other separatist movements, especially the South Ossetians who wish to be part of the Russian Federation. The neoconned Bush Regime is furious that the Russian bear was not intimidated by the US supported aggression of the American puppet state, Georgia. Instead of accepting the act of American hegemony that the neocon script called for, Russia sent the Americanized Georgian army fleeing in fear. Having failed with weapons, the Bush Regime now unleashes the rhetoric. The White House is warning Russia that failure to acquiesce to US hegemony could have a “significant, long-term impact on relations between Washington and Moscow.” Do the morons who comprise the Bush Regime really not understand that short of a surprise nuclear attack on Russia there is nothing whatsoever the US can do to Moscow? The Bush Regime owns no Russian currency that it can dump. The Russians own US dollars. The Bush Regime owns no Russian bonds that it can dump. The Russians own US bonds. The US can cut Russia off from no energy supplies. Russia can cut America’s European allies off from energy. President Reagan negotiated the end of the cold war with Soviet President Gorbachev. The neoconservatives, whom Reagan fired and drove from his administration, were furious. The neocons had hoped to win the cold war, thereby establishing American hegemony. The Republican Establishment reestablished its hegemony under Bush 1st that it had lost to Ronald Reagan. With this feat, intelligence was driven from the Republican Party. The neocons engineered their comeback with the First Gulf War and their propaganda, pure lies, that Iraqi troops bayoneted Kuwait babies in hospitals. The neocons made a further comeback with President Clinton, whom they convinced to bomb Serbia in order to permit separatist movements to become independent states dependent on America. With Bush 2nd, the neocons took over. Their agenda, American world hegemony, includes Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. So far the schemes of these ignorant and dangerous ideologues have come a cropper. Iraq, formerly in the hands of secular Sunnis who were a check on Iran, is, after the American invasion and occupation, in the hands of religious Shi’ites allied with Iran. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are resurgent, and a large NATO/US army there is unable to control the situation. One consequence of the neocons’ Afghan war has been the loss of power of the American puppet president of Pakistan, a Muslim country armed with nuclear weapons. The puppet president now faces impeachment, and the Pakistani military has informed the Americans to stop conducting military operations in Pakistani territory. The American puppets in Egypt and Jordan might be next to fall. In Iraq, the Shi’ites, having completed their ethnic cleansing of Sunnis from neighborhoods, have declared a cease fire in order to contradict the US propaganda that American withdrawal would lead to a blood bath. Negotiations on withdrawal dates are now underway between the Americans and the Iraqi government, which is no longer behaving like a puppet. Last year Hugo Chavez ridiculed Bush before the UN. Russia’s Putin ridiculed Bush as Comrade Wolf. On August 12, 2008, Pravda ridiculed Bush, “Bush: Why don’t you shut up.” Americans may think they are a superpower before whose presence the world trembles. But not the Russians. Those Americans stupid enough to think that America’s “superpower” insures its citizens from danger need to read the total contempt shown for President Bush in Pravada: “President Bush, Why don’t you shut up? In your statement on Monday regarding the legitimate actions of the Russian Federation in Georgia, you failed to mention the war crimes perpetrated by Georgian military forces, which American advisors support, against Russian and Ossetian civilians “President Bush, Why don’t you shut up? Your faithful ally, Mikhail Saakashvili, was announcing a ceasefire deal while his troops, with your advisors, were massing on Ossetia’s border, which they crossed under cover of night and destroyed Tskhinvali, targeting civilian structures just like your forces did in Iraq. “President Bush, Why don’t you shut up? Your American transport aircraft gave a ride home to thousands of Georgian soldiers from Iraq directly into the combat zone. “President Bush, Why don’t you shut up? How do you account for the fact that among the Georgian soldiers fleeing the fighting yesterday you could clearly hear officers using American English giving orders to “Get back inside” and how do you account for the fact that there are reports of American soldiers among the Georgian casualties? “President Bush, Why don’t you shut up? Do you really think anyone gives any importance whatsoever to your words after 8 years of your criminal and murderous regime and policies? Do you really believe you have any moral ground whatsoever and do you really imagine there is a single human being anywhere on this planet who does not stick up his middle finger every time you appear on a TV screen? Do you really believe you have the right to give any opinion or advice after Abu Ghraib? After Guantanamo? After the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens? After the torture by CIA operatives? Do you really believe you have any right to make a statement on any point of international law after your trumped-up charges against Iraq and the subsequent criminal invasion? “President Bush, Why don’t you shut up? Suppose Russia for instance declares that Georgia has weapons of mass destruction? And that Russia knows where these WMD are, namely in Tblisi and Poti and north, south, east and west of there? And that it must be true because there is “magnificent foreign intelligence” such as satellite photos of milk powder factories and baby cereals producing chemical weapons and which are currently being “driven around the country in vehicles”? Suppose Russia declares for instance that “Saakashvili stiffed the world” and it is “time for regime change”? Nice and simple, isn’t it, President Bush? “So, why don’t you shut up? Oh and by the way, send some more of your military advisors to Georgia, they are doing a sterling job. And they look all funny down the night sight, all green.” The US is not a superpower. It is a bankrupt farce run by imbeciles who were installed by stolen elections arranged by Karl Rove and Diebold. It is a laughing stock, that ignorantly affronts and attempts to bully an enormous country equipped with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. A population that tolerates the insane Bush Regime and its criminal neocon operatives has no claims to life on earth. Comments (30)

Not really a week with good prospects for peace on earth, good will to wo(men) is it? Suzan __________________________________

Military-Industrial Complex - A Bunch of Good-Time(s) Guys?

I read Tom Engelhardt's TomDispatch on a regular basis and have begun to wonder why I hadn't given more attention (at least initially) to the essay he published by Chalmers Johnson on July 27, 2008 (and I recommend reading the entire essay as it is excellent). Maybe my reluctance to dive in was because it reiterates a number of facts about our government's policies (and history of such) that are unpleasant to think about for too long. It hits me where I live (in enjoying the exposing of what's behind political realities) - ouch! - and yet, I just didn't want to revisit those emotions (and his essay is not surprising in its conclusions to anyone who has been paying attention). Should the CIA be abolished? Is it causing more problems than it was set up to solve? (Are you joshing me? Is that a serious question? Did you see The Good Shepherd?) But - back to serious commentary - upon reading it (this time carefully), the following paragraphs (and much, much more) from both Tom's intro and Chalmers' essay stand out as eminently important, worthy of consideration by as many people as we can lasso into doing such as it exponentially increases one's comprehension of the dangers inherent in the so-called post-9/11 world (and what a country governed by a Constitution that heretofore has limited the actions of the executive, legislative and judicial branches with a working set of "checks and balances" will lose with the (s)election of John "BushLeagueCheneGang" McCain): Tom begins:

To offer a bit of context for Chalmers Johnson's latest post on the privatization of U.S. intelligence, it's important to know just how lucrative that intelligence "business" has become. According to the latest estimate, the cumulative 2009 intelligence budget for the 16 agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community will be more than $55 billion. However, it's possible that the real figure in the deeply classified budget may soar over $66 billion, which would mean that the U.S. budget for spooks has more than doubled in less than a decade. And as Robert Dreyfuss points out at his invaluable blog at the Nation, even more spectacularly (and wastefully), much of that money will end up in the hands of the "private contractors" who, by now, make up a mini intelligence-industrial complex of their own. Chalmers Johnson, who once consulted for the CIA and more recently, in his book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, the third volume of his Blowback Trilogy, called for the Agency to be shut down, knows a thing or two about the world of American intelligence. As he has written, "An incompetent or unscrupulous intelligence agency can be as great a threat to national security as not having one at all." Now consider, with Johnson, just how incompetent and unscrupulous a thoroughly privatized intelligence "community" can turn out to be.

Chalmers argues (from The Military-Industrial Complex - It's Much Later Than You Think):

Most Americans have a rough idea what the term "military-industrial complex" means when they come across it in a newspaper or hear a politician mention it. President Dwight D. Eisenhower introduced the idea to the public in his farewell address of January 17, 1961. "Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime," he said, "or indeed by the fighting men of World War II and Korea… We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions… We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications… We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." Although Eisenhower's reference to the military-industrial complex is, by now, well-known, his warning against its "unwarranted influence" has, I believe, largely been ignored. Since 1961, there has been too little serious study of, or discussion of, the origins of the military-industrial complex, how it has changed over time, how governmental secrecy has hidden it from oversight by members of Congress or attentive citizens, and how it degrades our Constitutional structure of checks and balances. From its origins in the early 1940s, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was building up his "arsenal of democracy," down to the present moment, public opinion has usually assumed that it involved more or less equitable relations -- often termed a "partnership" -- between the high command and civilian overlords of the United States military and privately-owned, for-profit manufacturing and service enterprises. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that, from the time they first emerged, these relations were never equitable. In the formative years of the military-industrial complex, the public still deeply distrusted privately owned industrial firms because of the way they had contributed to the Great Depression. Thus, the leading role in the newly emerging relationship was played by the official governmental sector. A deeply popular, charismatic president, FDR sponsored these public-private relationships. They gained further legitimacy because their purpose was to rearm the country, as well as allied nations around the world, against the gathering forces of fascism. The private sector was eager to go along with this largely as a way to regain public trust and disguise its wartime profit-making.

It's a long essay, but very worth your time. Read the rest here. As a note says at the bottom of this essay, this "focuses on the new book by Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008). Other books noted: Eugene Jarecki's The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril (New York: Free Press, 2008); Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008); and Sheldon Wolin's Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008)." I believe that this essay is one that the whole country would benefit from reading before election day, and that enough citizens doing so might be enough to save our endangered Constitutional form of government for our grandchildren to enjoy as well. Thank you Chalmers Johnson and Tom Engelhardt. Suzan ____________________________________

The Servants' Quarters - Join United Progressives NOW!!!

This article was written/released in May of 2008, but the message is so relevant to current events and consequential to maintaining one's mental health that I recommend it wholeheartedly as an indispensable antidote to the poison you are fed daily by the MSM.(Emphasis marks are mine.) ___________________________________

Monday, 05 May 2008 In today's democracy, our leaders are at best dubious and at worst, completely unfit. Ideally they would meet all our expectations, but no one even comes close. Do they represent us? A little. Do they represent themselves? A lot. One of our more noted Democratic leaders campaigning for high office recently admitted the other day in a televised interview that she was rich. Yet she's been in public service for many years. What can be inferred from this is that our public servant has used public service strategically to enhance her own wealth, since she didn't start out being wealthy. No one sees anything wrong with this. Yet the conflict of interest is clear when we permit the purpose and value of being in public office to be so radically influenced by the perks one enjoys, or the opportunities one comes across, in order to become rich, that it overshadows everything else. Self interest and the public interest are uncomfortable companions, because the latter often gets bartered off for a pot of porridge heavy on pork and personal favors. Leaders are to be distrusted when the role of leadership itself is enhanced with the discretion to distribute power, wealth or resources in unequal amounts to just any group of people they favor. Leaders who can enact laws without the participation of those who are led have too much power. Leaders who can tax citizens without consulting with them first and obtaining their support and agreement for such a tax have too much power. It should be presumed that power will corrupt if there are no checks and balances for it. Leaders should not have power to dictate the terms by which others live or the lifestyle they choose to live without their consent. That's very fundamental to democracy. Leaders should have the power to inform, and then to step away, and let the people decide. When we respect our leaders, we will follow their advice. When we believe that another course is best for us, that should be our option in a democracy. Leaders lead. Dictators compel. At the very least it is the duty of our leaders to inform, advise, aid and enable the will of the people. At most, leadership becomes indistinguishable from the people themselves. They are in complete unison and harmony. Good leaders enable others to see the same vision they see. If they cannot do this, they need to go away, and we need to replace them with leaders who do open our eyes and our minds to truth. In fairness, it has also been observed that powerlessness also corrupts. The most obvious solution to that does not need to be re-invented; it's called democracy. When the poor are truly enfranchised, they will no longer be poor, because they will not permit those with economic advantages to sustain them to their own disadvantage. A father and mother, when they are whole, serve the needs of their children. It is the duty of parents to inform, advise, aid and enable their children’s knowledge, skills and dreams. Everyone wins. That is the fundamental outline of society’s responsibility as a whole. Any organization that pretends to represent the interests of society represents every single one of us. A community, in order to be whole, hears the needs of every individual. It hears the needs of the least, the sick, the weak, the disabled, and those handicapped by disadvantages of all sorts every bit as much as it hears the needs of its most fortunate and most advantaged. It does so, because that’s who the community is. These people are members of the community. When they are strong, the community is strong. When they are weak, the community is weak. It does not allow one segment of the community to prey upon and victimize the other. Those with power must use it to serve, not to gain more advantages. Our union is built upon those principles. We want to clarify where we stand on this right up front. When you contact us, don’t look for anything marked “Headquarters.” There won’t be a headquarters. You won’t find a mansion high on a hill with polished oak and Italian marble, and you won’t find anything resembling a white house. What you need to look for is a sign that says, “Servants’ Quarters.” We want to make very clear not just through token gestures but through the very core structure of how United Progressives is run what we intend to do for you. We are not here to tell you what you can do for your management; we’re here to ask you what we can do for you as citizens of a society that belongs to all of us. You vote for it. If you want universal health care, we’re here to fight for it. If you want public education through four years of college, we’re going to stand tall on that issue. If you want to bring the troops home now, that’s what we want too. We believe in a government of, for, and by the people, and that’s just what you get in United Progressives. You vote; we act. We are your servants. So, if you haven't already, join United Progressives now, and help us become the new thought and vision for America.

Enough said? Suzan _________________________________

The "Stupid" Party

Coming on the same day as the Bill Moyers' Journal interview with Dean Baker and Bob Herbert (see previous essay), it's almost poetic justice that Paul Krugman finally decided to call the Rethuglican Party by their true name: The Party of Stupid. Although, of course, they are not stupid. They just hope (and pray) that you, the voters, are. Read it and organize (or weep). _______________________________________

August 8, 2008 New York Times Know-Nothing Politics PAUL KRUGMAN So the G.O.P. has found its issue for the 2008 election. For the next three months the party plans to keep chanting: “Drill here! Drill now! Drill here! Drill now! Four legs good, two legs bad!” O.K., I added that last part. And the debate on energy policy has helped me find the words for something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid. Now, I don’t mean that G.O.P. politicians are, on average, any dumber than their Democratic counterparts. And I certainly don’t mean to question the often frightening smarts of Republican political operatives. What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.” In the case of oil, this takes the form of pretending that more drilling would produce fast relief at the gas pump. In fact, earlier this week Republicans in Congress actually claimed credit for the recent fall in oil prices: “The market is responding to the fact that we are here talking,” said Representative John Shadegg. What about the experts at the Department of Energy who say that it would take years before offshore drilling would yield any oil at all, and that even then the effect on prices at the pump would be “insignificant”? Presumably they’re just a bunch of wimps, probably Democrats. And the Democrats, as Representative Michele Bachmann assures us, “want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, take light rail to their government jobs.” Is this political pitch too dumb to succeed? Don’t count on it. Remember how the Iraq war was sold. The stuff about aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds was just window dressing. The main political argument was, “They attacked us, and we’re going to strike back” — and anyone who tried to point out that Saddam and Osama weren’t the same person was an effete snob who hated America, and probably looked French. Let’s also not forget that for years President Bush was the center of a cult of personality that lionized him as a real-world Forrest Gump, a simple man who prevails through his gut instincts and moral superiority. “Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man,” declared Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2004. “He’s not an intellectual. Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world.” It wasn’t until Hurricane Katrina — when the heckuva job done by the man of whom Ms. Noonan said, “if there’s a fire on the block, he’ll run out and help” revealed the true costs of obliviousness — that the cult began to fade. What’s more, the politics of stupidity didn’t just appeal to the poorly informed. Bear in mind that members of the political and media elites were more pro-war than the public at large in the fall of 2002, even though the flimsiness of the case for invading Iraq should have been even more obvious to those paying close attention to the issue than it was to the average voter. Why were the elite so hawkish? Well, I heard a number of people express privately the argument that some influential commentators made publicly — that the war was a good idea, not because Iraq posed a real threat, but because beating up someone in the Middle East, never mind who, would show Muslims that we mean business. In other words, even alleged wise men bought into the idea of macho posturing as policy. All this is in the past. But the state of the energy debate shows that Republicans, despite Mr. Bush’s plunge into record unpopularity and their defeat in 2006, still think that know-nothing politics works. And they may be right. Sad to say, the current drill-and-burn campaign is getting some political traction. According to one recent poll, 69 percent of Americans now favor expanded offshore drilling — and 51 percent of them believe that removing restrictions on drilling would reduce gas prices within a year. The headway Republicans are making on this issue won’t prevent Democrats from expanding their majority in Congress, but it might limit their gains — and could conceivably swing the presidential election, where the polls show a much closer race. In any case, remember this the next time someone calls for an end to partisanship, for working together to solve the country’s problems. It’s not going to happen — not as long as one of America’s two great parties believes that when it comes to politics, stupidity is the best policy.

Remember it precisely. Suzan ____________________________________

Bill, Dean and Bob

Two of my favorite intellectuals were guests of Bill Moyers' Journal last evening: Dean Baker (co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC) and Bob Herbert (columnist at The New York Times). (Access the podcast here.) And if you question their qualifications . . . Mr. Baker

previously worked as a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and (is) an assistant professor at Bucknell University. His blog, Beat the Press, features commentary on economic reporting. He received his Ph.D in economics from the University of Michigan.

Don't miss his many interesting columns which appear in Talking Points Memo.

He has written numerous books and articles, including The United States Since 1980 (Cambridge University Press, March 2007); The Conservative Nanny State: How The Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer (Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2006); Social Security: The Phony Crisis (with Mark Weisbrot) (University of Chicago Press, 1999). His book Getting Prices Right: The Battle Over the Consumer Price Index (M.E. Sharpe, 1997) was a winner of a Choice Book Award as one of the outstanding academic books of the year. He has worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, and the OECD's Trade Union Advisory Council. His columns have appeared in many major media outlets including The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, and The London Financial Times. He is frequently cited in economics reporting in major media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNBC and National Public Radio. Bob Herbert joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in 1993. His twice-a-week column comments on politics, urban affairs and social trends. Prior to joining The Times, Mr. Herbert was a national correspondent for NBC from 1991 to 1993, reporting regularly on The Today Show and NBC Nightly News. He had worked as a reporter and editor at The Daily News from 1976 until 1985, when he became a columnist and member of its editorial board. Herbert has also published a collection of essays, Promises Betrayed. He began his career as a reporter with The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., in 1970. He became its night city editor in 1973. Mr. Herbert has won numerous awards, including the Meyer Berger Award for coverage of New York City and the American Society of Newspaper Editors award for distinguished newspaper writing. He was chairman of the Pulitzer Prize jury for spot news reporting in 1993).

Who could ask for anything more? Well, I could for one. They talk about the economic issues currently being obscured by the MSM in fairly simple terms. The conversation was stimulating - almost elevating. And during the hour one begins to wonder. How is this country in such terrible economic trouble with thoughtful men like these two at the ready to elucidate any subject (and you should read Mr. Baker's take on the Social Security scam!) on which the majority of our voters seem confused or ignorant. Here's the transcript:

August 8, 2008 BILL MOYERS:Economists of every stripe agree that the credit crisis is out of control. For example, Charles Calomiras of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said this week, "We do need some regulation, smarter regulation, to prevent the abuse of the safety net." And the economist Dean Baker told the same reporter, "Wall Street just ran wild. It was some mix of irresponsibility and downright greed." Dean Baker is with me now. He is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., and author of the much-read blog BEAT THE PRESS, where he spares no one in the media, including yours truly. Also with us is Bob Herbert, the nationally syndicated columnist for THE NEW YORK TIMES, whose book, PROMISES BETRAYED, is one I highly recommend. Gentlemen, welcome to the Journal. DEAN BAKER:Great to see you, Bill. BILL MOYERS: Both of you keep your eyes on issues of fairness in America. And we just saw a report on how working people with low incomes are bamboozled by rapacious lenders who make money out of other people's poverty. So I want to ask you, Dean Baker, how is it we've come to accept a predatory economy as the American way of life? DEAN BAKER:Well, basically we adopted this policy of anything goes, so that if Wall Street business could dole it and they could make money on it, we let them get away with it. You know, the fact that sub-prime mortgages had more than doubled as a share of the economy, that should have been, you know, just an alarm bell sounding off to everyone. And this was, you know, I'm an economist. I see this data. But, you know, this widely known. But yet, people are just looking the other way. And we knew people were being taken advantage of. We knew it was going to end very badly. BILL MOYERS:You're not an economist. You're a reporter who tell the stories. And you've been telling the stories of this for some time now? BOB HERBERT:Sure. I was out in Chicago with a woman — predatory lending, in terms of mortgages. She was about to lose her home. They were going to foreclose the home. The woman was elderly. She was ill, and she was blind. And I sat in her living room with her attorney. And she's showing me these papers. They were still offering — she was getting offers in the mail for another mortgage on a house, to refinance again. And she was getting offers in the mail to take out additional credit cards. The final loan that she had signed, that pushed her over the edge, and caused her to lose her home, she signed in the hospital. The mortgage broker came into the hospital, and the woman is almost blind. And she had no idea what she was signing. And as far as I understood, there was no hope. She was going to lose her home. I think one of the reasons this sort of thing is happening is because you don't have anyone who's looking out for the interests of ordinary people, whether they're middle class or whether they're poor. The government, for a long time now, has been on the side of the great corporations, on the side of Wall Street, on the side of the financial services industry. So who looks out for the little people? DEAN BAKER:That's exactly right. No one is looking out for them. And again, this is, you know, you have this great effort now to, you know, all the people who should have been looking out, the last six, seven, eight years, are all going, "Oh, well, who could have known? Who could have known?" And they'll put Alan Greenspan here at the pedestal, because he's going oh, he had no idea this was going on. And you had to try not to know this was going on. Certainly, someone like Alan Greenspan, our reserve board chair, had all the data I have times a thousand. He absolutely knew what was going on. And, you know, he was doing his best to look the other way, because you had a lot of big interests who were making a lot of money. You could prey on people, as, you know, as was shown. BILL MOYERS:How did the media ignore it or not deal with it? How did the two parties fail to rise to the occasion? Why did we accept it? BOB HERBERT:I think the media has sort of, in many cases, gone along for the ride. It's almost like with the war in Iraq. I mean, you just had so many people in the media who thought that the war in Iraq was a good idea and never blew the whistle, or whatever Because I think the media's part of the establishment, which is where the establishment has gone these days. When I go around the country talking to ordinary people, the thing that I hear over and over again is that people think they really do not have a voice, that they may feel that something is wrong, they may have an idea of something that should be changed. But they don't think that they can translate that into action. That they are not heard in Washington. DEAN BAKER:I'd like to pick up on that point about the media. I mean, you know, I'm writing about their reporting on economic issues. And, you know, it's a real simple thing sometimes. You just look at some of these articles. So, you know, they're writing something about mortgages. You know, well, they call up someone at Citigroup. You know, and they think that's good. I mean, it's fine to talk to someone at Citigroup. I'm not saying that- BILL MOYERS:They're calling somebody that has a stake in- DEAN BAKER:Yeah, yeah. And they don't think like the person has a stake. In fact, I remember through the — we actually did a search. And we looked, who is the most widely cited person about the housing market. It was David Lereah, who's the chief economist of the National Association of Realtors. And very often, that's the only source. And I actually had a reporter for a major newspaper, not a new reporter, someone who had been there for years, asking me, "Do you think David Lereah's biased?" I just didn't know what to say. I mean, I don't want to say, "Well, I think — how could you not think he's biased?" BOB HERBERT:I think part of it is just common sense. I mean, you know, you learn this with the nuns back in grammar school. If you take the watchdog out of the picture, if you just get rid of regulation — oh, we don't need regulation any more, you know, do you think that maybe some kind of chicanery is going to be out there? You're talking about things running wild? I mean, that's exactly what happens. BILL MOYERS:Your colleague, Gretchen Morgenson, who's been on this show- DEAN BAKER:Been all over- BILL MOYERS:Yeah. She says, "The credit crisis has exposed and worsened a dangerous and deepening divide in the country between a vast number of average borrowers and a fairly elite slice of corporations, banks and executives enriched by the mortgage mania." I mean, and, you know, this morning, I saw a story that the CEO of Fanny Mae, Daniel Mudd, has made more than $42 million while the company has been tanking. And that doesn't, that's not the America that I want to remembered. DEAN BAKER:No, it's really incredible. And even as, you know, things are going down in flames, there's still no interest in holding them accountable. So you have the CEO of Fanny Mae gets over 40 million, CEO of Freddie Mac got 19.6 million in a single year. Both companies are essentially bankrupt. I mean, there's been this charade, like, oh, it's just bad press, and, you know, shorting their money. You know, they're basically bankrupt. If anyone doubted that, well, just take away the government support and see how long they hold up. You know, they're basically bankrupt companies. And the people who ran them into the ground are still sitting there, collecting millions of dollars. And it's just kind of mind boggling. BOB HERBERT:What is the point of having government on the side of the rich and powerful in this society? I mean, just off the top of my head. I mean, that seems insane. So, you have, for example, credit cards. People are, I mean, people are milking the equity out of their homes to pay off credit card debt, which is really insane. But how can it possibly be okay to have credit rates of credit card interest that were usurious, and, you know, a few decades ago, if a loan shark was charging that kind of interest, the guy would have been — the guy would have been knocked out. But that's okay. The government comes down on the side of the corporations, making it more difficult for ordinary workers to organize. So you can't become part of a union which could represent your interests. And you can just follow this all along the line. BILL MOYERS:Listen to this. Quote: "Between 2000 and 2006, the last time since figures were available, those among the very top ten percent of all households, on average, increased their income by about two percent, while those in the bottom 90 percent lost more than four percent." I mean, how is it we're allowing this to happen, the stagnation of wages for the majority of people? DEAN BAKER:Well, again, we just have policies in place that just keep skewing income more and more upwards. So, you know, unions, I think, are a great example, perhaps the best single one we could point to, that, you know, unions are a great institution for ensuring that ordinary workers got their piece of the pie. So, when productivity went up, their wages more or less went up with it. Now, you know, we went — you go back a quarter century, and almost 20 percent of the private sector workforce was union. Today, it's about seven percent. I mean, it's just an incredible difference over the- BILL MOYERS:And there's evidence that union organizing actually brought up non-union wages, too, right? DEAN BAKER:Absolutely. You know, so you bring up wages for the whole sector, for the obvious reason. You know, if the union workers in the auto individual are getting 20 an hour, well, if you're Honda or whoever, and you don't want a union there, well, you're going to have to pay something close to it, 'cause, you know, you're not going to get away with paying the minimum wage and think you're not going to have a union come in. BILL MOYERS:I pulled a story off the internet this morning, that companies, big corporations are raising $100 million to put in the campaign this fall. In Walmart, we saw last week instructed its supervisors and managers to urge workers not to vote Democratic this fall. What's going on there? DEAN BAKER:Well, it's really almost making a charade of the elections. I mean, you know, Bob was talking before about how, you know, it's so difficult to unionize. Because ostensibly, you know, it's supposed to be a neutral process. You know, the workers get to decide. But it's absolutely standard practice now for employers to figure out who's organizing, and they fire them. It's against the law, but the penalties are so minor that, you know, so what? You know, six months, a year, two years down the road, they end up losing. They pay, you know, a very small fine. They've prevented their place from being unionized. Now they're applying the same strategy, it seems, to elections more generally. We're going to have Walmart, that has, you know, over a million employees. And they're going to be scaring them, or doing their best, that, you know, if Barack Obama and the Democrats win, you're going to lose your job. BOB HERBERT:By definition, if you can get yourself together, organize yourself, raise $100 million for whatever kind of effort, you are organized. And then, if the other side is not organized, you're wealthy and organized. The other side is not wealthy, and not organized. Who has the advantage here? I mean- BILL MOYERS:Every time guys like you talk like this, though "The Wall Street Journal" says you're fighting a class war. BOB HERBERT:The class war is over, and we lost. There was a class war. We've been defeated. BILL MOYERS:What do you mean? BOB HERBERT:We've had, instead of a redistribution of the wealth from the top down, we've had the opposite. We've redistributed the wealth from the bottom up. The top sliver of the population has done fabulously well over the past three decades or so. And the rest have either stagnated or fallen behind. BILL MOYERS:You wrote a couple of weeks ago, Bob Herbert, that the biggest failings of the two parties right now is their unwillingness or inability to be forthright in telling the public about this crisis. What did you mean by "this crisis"? BOB HERBERT:I think that the country is really in tough circumstances. The financial sector is in crisis. You have the economy in tough shape, in terms of employment and that sort of thing. You have the housing crisis that's not going to go away for a while. And I think we're really vulnerable in terms of people's standards of living. And I don't think the politicians are telling the truth about this. And I especially I don't think the Democratic Party has been telling us the truth. They are the ones that generally should be on the side of working people. DEAN BAKER:Yeah I agree with that completely. We actually did an analysis recently, looking at the impact on people's wealth. We're looking at the late baby boomers, myself included, 45 to 54, you know. So this group of people that are close to retirement, but they still have a few years left in the work force. And we looked at the median wealth of this group. And this is, you know, obviously middle income people, by definition. The median wealth of this group is less than $100,000. Now, the vast majority do not have a defined benefit pension. So these are people that are approaching retirement, and they're overwhelming majority of them are going to have almost nothing other than the Social Security and Medicare to support them in their retirement years. And, you know, again, this is, you know, this is middle income people that you would expect we're counting equity in their home, by the way. So they have most of their home is not paid off. So you have people that are approaching retirement. They still have a big mortgage left in their house, and basically, nothing else. BILL MOYERS:So how is it that some people still worship at the altar of trickle down economics? DEAN BAKER:I think they're not given the story. I mean, again, it gets back to the media. You know, this is — you know, if the media were talking about this the way I think they should, and perhaps Bob would agree with me on this, this should be like, you know, front page every day. You know, here are the policies. You know, we have, well, I'll beat up on the Republicans here. You know, they're saying, you know, we're going to have more trickle down economics- BILL MOYERS:He would beat up on the Democrats. He's been very critical about- DEAN BAKER:But I mean, you know, Senator McCain is going to be running for, is running for President. And he's saying, "Well, we have to have tax cuts." You know, oriented primary towards upper income people. Now, that should be like, well, we're just going to beat our heads against the wall a few more times. 'Cause we've done this. You know, how many more times do you have to try an experiment and see it fail, and you could still get it taken seriously? I mean, they'll make fun of, you know, Senator Obama. They'll go talk about his minister. And we're probably going to be hearing about that all through the fall. And here, you have John McCain with an economic program that we know does not work in terms of providing benefits and providing jobs for typical people. But he's going to be treated seriously with it. BILL MOYERS:You had the Republicans this week talking about drilling offshore and more drilling on our continent, that gas prices will come down. DEAN BAKER:Well, this is again — I'll beat up on the media for this. 'Cause there's really no ambiguity. I mean, if you've got any expert out here, we know, well, at least, let me put it this way: We have no reason to believe there's a significant amount of oil there. I mean, maybe Saudi Arabia's hidden under Florida somewhere that we didn't know about. But in terms of, you know, the evidence we have, there's very little oil there. I mean, I wrote a column making fun of that story. I said, "John McCain wants to drill in your toilet." I mean, maybe, I don't know he does. But- BILL MOYERS:Even Obama this week said he's willing to negotiate on the issue of- DEAN BAKER:He gets intimidated by it. BOB HERBERT:Because McCain is getting traction in the polls on this issue. I talked to Senator John Kerry just a couple of days ago on this issue. And he said, "This is the most fraudulent thing that you can imagine. It's just absurd. You're not even in the best case scenario, you're not even gonna get any oil from these offshore operations for another ten years." And even maximum — what's even maximum, like 200 and some thousand gallons a day. DEAN BAKER:It's only two-tenths of one percent of world supply. BOB HERBERT:In 2030, I think- DEAN BAKER:Yeah, yeah. So you're talking about that by- BOB HERBERT:-is when it maxes out. DEAN BAKER:Yeah. That might drop the price of gas at that point, by three cents a gallon, you know. BOB HERBERT:In 20- DEAN BAKER:2030. BILL MOYERS:So let me show you a video we have here, of the former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, who was on television this week, saying, "Drill now, drill here." Watch this. BILL KILMEADE:Let's say we start drilling in two months of the coast of Florida right at the Continental Shelf. When can we get the oil when will it effect the price of gas and oil? NEWT GINGRICH:I tell you what I'm going to get you a guest, if you'll take him, whose an intern at the American Enterprise Institute and a junior at Princeton who has found an economics paper that argues that the price of oil will start to drop almost immediately on the expectation of future supply. Everybody who is a professional economist knows if there an expectation that supply is going to go up prices start to come down. And they start to come down immediately because speculators start to sell out of the market because they suddenly realize that they're going to lose their position. GRETCHEN CARLSON SOT:Yeah, but I find it interesting that more economists are not on the record saying that. BILL MOYERS:Newt Gingrich says that all economists support more drilling. You're an economist, Dean Baker. Will more oil drilling bring prices down immediately, as Gingrich says? DEAN BAKER:Well, again, the point here is that there's very little oil at stake. And it's not gonna be coming online for ten years, the first drops. And we don't get, you know, our full production, which again, is very, very modest for about 20 years. So the impact will be basically zilch. The Republicans are selling garbage. I mean, you know, you can drill wherever you want. You can wreck the environment that way, but you're not going to lower the price of gas. But yet, you've got a majority of people, according to the polls, that they're going, "Yes, yes, yes. Let's drill, 'cause we want cheap gas." BILL MOYERS:Do you see anything coming from Obama that deals with what we've been discussing that strikes you as serious? BOB HERBERT:Well, you know, it's easy to underestimate Barack Obama. And I've underestimated him — for a while. He put together a brilliant primary strategy. But, you know, I frankly wish he was taking a more populist tack on the economy, talking much more about jobs, talking much more about how recent policies that some of them are not so recent any more, have really harmed the interests, the economic interests of the middle class, and working people. And sort of hammered that home, so that you would get a response to guys like Gingrich coming on television and talking nonsense, and that sort of thing. But that, so far, has not been Obama's way. So I don't know whether we're going to see that or not. BILL MOYERS: I have a story on my desk now, a study done, showing that while Obama has been very successful, as he himself boasts, of raising money from small contributors on the internet, he also has his Goliaths. BILL MOYERS:He has huge, large numbers of people who have given him multi millions of dollars. DEAN BAKER:And that's, I think, a very big issue. Because right now, I mean, what's front and center, at least for me, is, you know, look, we have — we're going into this recession because of Wall Street, you know, just incredible corruption. I mean, you know, the amount – the "Times" had an article about a month or so back, where they just documented that more than half of the profits of the Wall Street banks over the years '04 to '07 — you know, just golden years for Wall Street have already been lost in write downs. I mean, which is just ungodly incompetence and/or corruption. Take your pick. BILL MOYERS:What does that mean for ordinary people? DEAN BAKER:Well, what it means is that they were paying money in all sorts of fees, you know, the sub-prime or up — they were paying all this money. And it, you know, it evaporated because, you know, they had their loans lost. Now, if you went to the pockets of the executives, you know, you have people who are running the Wall Street firms who made out like bandits, made tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions. But it did nothing for the economy. And a lot of those people are working in Obama's campaign. They're the big funders. You know, so that raises serious issues, because again, if I were — what I'd like to see Barack Obama doing is going, "We've got a real problem that's going on Wall Street." You know, we should be reining them in. BILL MOYERS:But he's not? DEAN BAKER:He's not. BOB HERBERT:No. And, you know — and this idea that the Republicans are trying to portray Obama as sort of this raving liberal or raving leftist, and the sort of thing. He's never been that. He's always been a moderate in terms of his policies, a moderate Democrat. It remains to be seen whether sort of this posture he's pursuing is in fact, a winning strategy in a national election when the country's going through economic hard times. I don't know whether it is or not. BILL MOYERS:No matter who wins this election, the next administration will inherit the mess. You know, ten trillion dollars in debt, two in these wars, stagnating paychecks, growing inequality. What's the first thing each of you would like to see the next administration do, whether it's McCain or Obama? DEAN BAKER:Well, I'm going to give you two. I do want to see us get out of Iraq. You have to put that front and center. But the other thing I'd really love to see them do is health care. We have to fix our health care system, because it's just, it's outrageous. People don't get coverage. But we also can't afford it. So even if people that are getting coverage, they're seeing high bills. The employers, I mean, not employers here. But they do have to pass on those costs. So if they're seeing higher insurance premiums year by year, that means less money for paychecks. We have to fix our health care system. It's broken. BOB HERBERT:I agree on the war. I think you've got to get out of Iraq. I don't think anything substantive is going to go forward in this country, until we start to bring most of the troops out of Iraq. I'm not sure how much of a or how big a health care bill a Democrat could get passed. I think jobs, employment, is a real issue I would focus on. And I think the infrastructure, where we need to redevelop it, repair it- BILL MOYERS:Bridges, highways, roads. BOB HERBERT:-is a source of good jobs. And I would really focus on that. And I don't know if you can get a major health care bill early, and also a major effort on infrastructure at the same time. BILL MOYERS:Bob Herbert, Dean Baker, let's continue this conversation in the fall, and see what's going on after the two conventions. BOB HERBERT:Great. BILL MOYERS:Thank you for being with me today.

On his blog, Bill asks the question: What Should The Next Administration Do About America's Troubles? Three not-to-be-missed blog comments:

Bob Herbert and Dean Baker's comments when combined with the predatory lending expose are the best description of systematic purposeful fascism I have ever seen. Daniel Guerin (wrote Fascism and Big Business) after WWII tried to describe what had happened to Germany and Italy as government allied with corporate business to oppress and direct the awareness and volition of the public. The resultant extractive crisis led inevitably to war as a perpetuating strategy. This Journal episode presents a clearer picture. Bill Moyers points to the 80 Billion dollars banked by the Iraqi elite as their country fries. The free trading propagandists on this blog might say, "What do you care Moyers? It ain't your money." (I'll leave Bill to answer that one.) Even bigger is the 3 to 4 trillion bill the War on Terror will cost the American public while our elite profits. Add that to the 10 trillion+ they say we owe. Another poignant book "The Assassination of Julius Caesar" (by Michael Parenti) outlines the internal extractive strategy of the Roman Empire, and how it led to systematic murder of dissident politicians. This simplified strategy of the classic iron age illustrates the structural vulnerabilities of our own constitutional government today. Parenti tells how land was appropriated for elite uses even while the farmers were drafted to fight overseas, which made for a food shortage. Bob Herbert proclaims the public as having lost the class war to the elite. If so, we are well into fascism, and things will get more meager and oppressive before this dark age ends. It is the darkest age yet when one recognizes that the electronic surveillance cage in China is coming here next (Witness the consumer profiling at J.D. Byrider.), and that wage slave exploitation of the majority of our workforce by off-shore creditors (as in Saipan; remember Delay's defense of peonage-slavery last week?)is also imminent. Your children will replace Mexican immigrants in meat plants and roadpaving (tollways of course) if something isn't done. Add the arrest of sustainable energy and lifestyle and you have planetary suicide for corporate profit. Again, I have to applaud my emotional friend Grady for berating the upper middle-class intelligentsia for their complacency on this blog recently. His insight has prompted me to recognize that many of you expect class segregation from the impending Holocaust, that you expect to be spared because of your usefulness. Maybe this would have been so before intellectual automation, but now you will be regarded as chickens and pigs, just like us poor people. Your turn will come just like the trade unionists, and the cripples, and the gypsies and so on at the ovens where soylent green is produced. Saints Bob Herbert and Dean Baker and Bill Moyers will be marching in.... IF SOMETHING ISN"T DONE!!!!!!!!! Posted by: Jack Martin | August 9, 2008 I was disappointed, Bill, that I didn't hear either economist or you say the word "moral", especially as in "moral hazard." As any economist will tell you, a moral hazard is the government bailing you out for you immoral behavior --- well, economists seldom use moral in that context, using instead words like "imprudence" and "irresponsible." What the economists never give as examples of the government bailing out people for "imprudence" or "irresponsibility" or in the word you and I would use, "immorality" are these moral hazards: - legalized usury - high pay and even bonuses with no liability for bankrupting the corporation they assume top responsibility for as CEO - calling for repeal of Sabanes-Oxley because that makes the CEO legally liable for false statements in legal documents reporting financial status - earning a commission for convincing a seriously ill blind woman to sign documents leading to high interest rates and the loss of her home - earning a commission by convincing a poor person that signing a liar loan will improve their financial situation - earning a commission for giving bonds backed by liar loans AAA ratings - drafting/introducing the Commodities Futures Modernization Act into Congress and including it in the last minute omnibus budget bill - calling for the implicit sale of the mineral resources, like oil, owned by We the People at low, zero, or even negative prices in order to win votes Bill, if you get to talk to Obama, or McCain for that matter, before the election is over, ask about his position on morality, and specifically the moral hazard of legalizing or government sanctioning of the immoral acts which seem to be encoded in every faith tradition: - greed - usury - lying - theft Taking my lead from Ben Stein, economists who wear Adam Smith ties declare corporations free of morality, which frees all agents, known as employees and officers, from any moral constraints. In fact, these economists argue that an employee that lets morality guide his actions at the expense of corporate profit is committing an economic evil of failing to place greed above all else. Of course, Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations to describe a more moral political economy, one that included taxing the rich more than the poor, among other things. This works was in essence an expanded chapter in his agnostic work putting forth the moral guide to life and society. Thus those Adam Smith tie wearers have made an art of de-moral-izing the work of Adam Smith that they claim as their authority. Posted by: mulp | August 9, 2008 at one point, our country had decided that there was a limit on interest charges; we felt that there was a point above which, interest was really theft/abuse/immoral. that changed when states like south dakota, deleware decided that they would allow companies whose home office was in their state to charge any amount of interest. at least that's my understanding. that move along with other factors such as bank deregtulation/phil gramm legislation loopholes/incentives has assisted companies to exploit those who are already treading water; those whose each breath includes some of the h20 that's just below their nose. how is it possible that payday loans can collect 320% interest? what legislator could comfortably say, "oh yuh. 320% is a reasonable charge; i'm good with that". upwards of 85% of all payday loans are recurring meaning that the debtor simply continues to pay the 320% interest and never reduces the principal. if one "borrows" ~$300ish, one pays ~$75 every 2 weeks; in 2 months one has paid the amount owed but not dented the "principal". most payday loans extend much further than 2 mos. our country is becoming/has become so apathetic; so non-empathetic; so immoral. this, in what many call the most religious nation on the planet. empathy is the engine of our species social evolution; stamping it out is to extinguish the energy source of our continued improvement. "they'll sell you the rope ... used to hang themselves" has never been more apt. this is true of democrats (joe biden et alia) and republicans. Posted by: brian cecere | August 9, 2008

Fail to heed these warnings at your (and your children's) economic peril. Suzan ________________________________

The Sins John Edwards Did Not Commit

I said to anyone who would listen at the time of John Edwards' quick exit from the presidential race that something unusual and/or unexpected must have happened to cause such a rapid departure, particularly coming on the heels of his promise to stay in until the end. Now we know what it was. What I want to know (and it is only just that we find out soon) are the details of the blackmail and who was behind it. Brent Budowsky speaks for me and most of my friends. Read it here or in full below. _____________________________________

August 8, 2008 The Sins John Edwards Did Not Commit Brent Budowsky John Edwards did not lie to get America into a war that has cost more than 4,000 American lives. John Edwards did not commit acts of torture that violate the Geneva Conventions, American laws and commonly accepted standards of decency. John Edwards did not commit massive acts of violation of the FISA law that involve thousands of counts of spying on Americans in violation of federal law. John Edwards did not slander war heroes such as John Kerry and Max Cleland in the mindless pursuit of power. John Edwards did not claim pre-emptive power to initiate wars without authorization, nor did John Edwards claim the power to issue pieces of paper that would negate a thousand American laws that he chose not to faithfully execute. John Edwards did not claim executive privilege in the most outrageous, extra-legal manner in order to cover up major wrongdoing and probable criminal acts by multiple members of his administration. John Edwards's sin hurt one very good woman and good kids, which is an unpardonable wrong. John Edwards will not issue pardons for crimes that did grave damage to the nation.

But he did hurt Elizabeth and his children and I find that (personally) unforgiveable. Suzan _______________________________