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The Elections and the Responsibility of the Intellectual to Speak Truth to Power
Twelve Reasons to Reject Obama and Support Nader-McKinney
James Petras
The presidential elections in the US, once again, provide an acid test of the integrity and consequential conduct of US intellectuals. If it is the duty and responsibility of the public intellectual to speak truth to power, the recent statements of most of our well-known and prestigious public pundits have failed miserably. Instead of highlighting, exposing and denouncing the reactionary foreign and domestic policies of Democratic Party candidate Senator Barack Obama, they have chosen to support him, 'critically, offering as excuses that even limited differences can result in positive outcomes,and that Obama is the lesser evil and creates an opportunity for a possibility of change.
Putting Eye Shadow on a Reptile
Les Visible
I’ve been thinking about this for awhile but a comment from one of the Smoking Mirrors readers made it even more clear in my mind. I’m going to try to sketch this out in my limited fashion and hope that you will give me your thoughts about this.
To a certain degree it makes a great deal of sense and it’s come into my mind over the recent months… glaringly… up close… fine German lens-like… “crystal” as I like to say, either when understanding someone’s negative attention …or when I had to impress someone with their need to understand me in ways that I , thankfully, don’t encounter that much anymore but which residence in the former United States used to make necessary on occasion. Except we’re not talking about negative attention here and “crystal” only gets said in reply so… never mind.
Some of you may be familiar with the game of “Risk”. I had that game around for awhile but it was never easy to find enough people to play it with because it requires getting several really smart and informed people into the same room to do it and that’s a commodity that is increasingly rare as time passes. It’s a little like Chess but… I think you get the idea and you can google it if you don’t. It might help to encourage you to look at the way Napoleon liked to wage war. Even though he was one of history’s biggest losers he was also one of the great military tacticians of all time. He revolutionized certain facets of combat.
True Vote Summarizes Problems in U.S. Election Thus Far
Kevin Zeese
“Unacceptable long lines, machine problems, registration and voter challenges and deception of voters”
The election integrity organization True Vote released a summary of the election-related problems that have been seen thus far in the 2008 election. True Vote keeps a daily summary of election activity on its website www.TrueVote.US.org.
Kevin Zeese, the executive director of the organization summarized what has occurred so far saying “Early voting has been like watching an election in a slow meltdown. The U.S. has been seeing long lines in early voting with people waiting hours to vote. Electronic voting machines including touch screens and optical scans have shown consistent problems, the most dramatic being the switching of votes reported in West Virginia, Texas and Tennessee.
The End of Prosperity
Stephen Lendman
From too much of a good thing. From the 1980s and 1990s excesses. From the longest ever US bull market. Heavily manipulated to keep it levitating. From August 1982 to January 2000. An illusory reprieve from October 2002 to October 2007. Fluctuations aside, all lost in the past 12 months. The wages of sin are now due, and payment is being painfully extracted. From all nations globally. Affecting ordinary people the most who had nothing to do with creating booms and busts. They got little on the upside but are paying dearly for the down.
The Triumph of Ignorance: How Morons Succeed in U.S. Politics
George Monbiot
Obama has a lot to offer, but until our education system is fixed or religious fundamentalism withers, anti-intellectuals will flaunt their ignorance.
How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the United States come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama is a Muslim and a terrorist?
Like most people on this side of the Atlantic, I have spent my adult life mystified by American politics. The United States has the world's best universities and attracts the world's finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.
Palestinian Kristallnacht
Jonathan Cook
Mohammed Arabi, 84, a survivor of the Kafr
Qassem massacre, stands by the graves of the
47 villagers killed by Israeli police in 1956.
Message of Kafr Qassem massacre lives on for Palestinians. In a conflict that has produced more than its share of suffering and tragedy, the name of Kafr Qassem lives on in infamy more than half a century after Israeli police gunned down 47 Palestinian civilians, including women and children, in the village.
This week Kafr Qassem's inhabitants, joined by a handful of Israeli Jewish sympathizers, commemorated the anniversary of the deaths 52 years ago by marching to the cemetery where the victims were laid to rest.
They did so as the local media revisited the events, publishing testimonies from two former senior police officers who recalled the order from their commander to shoot all civilians breaking a last-minute curfew imposed on the village, which lies just inside Israel's borders.
Beware the twin towers of electronic election theft
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
Obama supporters are exuding a potentially fatal air of confidence and expectation. Intoxicated by favorable polls and a gusher of campaign spending, many are, in John McCain’s phrase, “measuring the drapes in the White House.”
It is a classic error, made lethal by the Democratic Party’s ongoing unwillingness to face the realities of electronic election theft.
In fact, the twin towers of pre-election disenfranchisement and rigged electronic vote counts make an Obama victory at best an even call, no matter how far ahead he may seem in the polls.
As reported by Bradblog, Greg Palast, Robert F. Kennedy, Mark Crispin Miller and others, the Republicans are waging all-out war to purge hundreds of thousands of Democrats from the voter rolls. The now familiar attacks on ACORN are a smokescreen to cover highly effective state-by-state assaults on computerized registration lists. These lists are often privatized and run by Republican-connected companies like Triad in Ohio.
The diplomacy of lying
John Pilger
[+] Obama’s job is to present a benign, even progressive face that will revive America’s democratic pretensions, internationally and domestically, while ensuring nothing of substance changes.
![[+]](http://img.timeinc.net/time/photoessays/2007/obama_portrait/barack_obama_01.jpg){kind=link}
In 1992, Mark Higson, the Foreign Office official responsible for Iraq, appeared before the Scott inquiry into the scandal of arms sold illegally to Saddam Hussein. He described a “culture of lying” at the heart of British foreign policymaking. I asked him how frequently ministers and officials lied to parliament.
“It’s systemic,” he said. “The draft letters I wrote for various ministers were saying that nothing had changed, the embargo on the sale of arms to Iraq was the same.”
“Was that true?” I asked.
“No, it wasn’t true.”
“And your superiors knew it wasn’t true?”
“Yes.”
“So how much truth did the public get?”
“The public got as much truth as we could squeeze out, given that we told downright lies.”
Workers, Unite! Demand that you be paid in Gold Bullion!
Len Hart
Put 'supply side' nonsense to the test! Demand that you be paid in gold bullion. If right wing ideology and theories were correct, your bosses should not have a problem with it. They will not accede to your demands because they know that right wing economics is pure bullshit!
The right wing made a big mistake when it tried to tar Obama with a canard, accusing him of advocating Marxism by 'spreading the wealth around'. But it has been the GOP since Ronald Reagan's improvident tax cut which 'spread the wealth around' upward to the top one percent of the population. That increasingly tiny elite has since 'spread the wealth around' among their various investments, none of which create wealth.
YOUR NEW PRESIDENT, ZBIG BROTHER
Alan Stang
As I write, little more than a week remains before E-Day, on which most Americans will vote. Nerves are being fearfully wracked. Even people who are usually somnolent say they can’t take the stress. There is a real danger that, unaddressed, the frustration of choosing between a Communist illegal alien raised by a Communist sex pervert and a POW traitor who is a Soviet front man could lead to an epidemic of Acid Reflux Disease or even an outbreak of Restless Leg Syndrome.
The purpose of this modest piece is to reassure you. Stop tormenting yourself. Further self-flagellation is pointless. Your next President has already been selected. Didn’t you know? Sure, go ahead and vote if you like, if you have nothing else to do, if you don’t mind standing in long lines between Obamatron morons and McCrud zombies, but enjoy the reassurance of knowing that the powers above Ponzi Paulson and Helicopter Ben Bernanke and Co. have already made their choice.
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