Life in OUR America, Volume 2, The Livyjr Files Options

[Livyjr]

Lao Tze viewed the clash of ideologies as a fact of social evolution, but he observed, also, that some ideologies make inroads into the minds of people, while others cause disastrous counter-reactions!

Lao Tze believed that the side that is so socially evolved that it would experience grief over the situation would be the side whose ideology would ultimately triumph!

- Commentaries on Tao Te Ching of Lao Tze, by R. L. Wing

"Lao Tze believed that the side that is so socially evolved that it would experience grief over the situation would be the side whose ideology would ultimately triumph!"

I thought about this for quite a while last night, and it just kept coming back to me that this would likely NOT BE George W. Bush's side, and so .....

Whoever else gets there first, wins!

[Livyjr]

SO!

Okay!

Let's see here!

On Friday, December 12, 2003, New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer collected more than $2 million at a political fund-raiser, with hedge fund managers and lawyers among the big donors, and said HE COULD ACCEPT CAMPAIGN FUNDS FROM THE INVESTMENT COMMUNITY WITHOUT COMPROMISING HIS ENFORCEMENT ROLE.

Right!

Check!

AND ...

A Spitzer campaign aide who declined to be identified said hedge funds, lawyers AND THE REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY were among his LEADING SOURCES of campaign MONEY.

Okay!

Right!

Check again!

I think I got all of that!

BUT ......

Didn't the F.B.I. say in March of 1989 that the Rensselaer County Department of Health was violating state and local laws to FACILITATE the REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY?

And then, on 8-22-01, didn't Eliot Spitzer sanction the unlawful "PSYCHIATRIC TAKE-DOWN" of the very witness who had gathered the evidence that the F.B.I then relied upon to form its own conclusion in March of 1989 that the Rensselaer County Department of Health was violating state and local laws to FACILITATE the REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY?

And then Eliot Spitzer allegedly took money, FROM THE REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY?

SO?

What did they buy, for their money?

Any quesses?

And who in Hell is checking up on Eliot Spitzer, anyway, beyond Rensselaer County Criminal Court Justice Pat McGrath, whose opinion really seems to count for exactly nothing at all with the WHITE NIGHT of BROADWAY, the inestimable Mr. Eliot Spitzer, himself?

Oh, that's right!

In all the excitement, why, I just plain forgot!

Eliot is!

And speaking of another necessary "player" here, in this little drama that has been playing itself out in the alleged corrupt EMPIRE STATE of New York, or perhaps, another "piece of the puzzle", we have as follows:

"Bruno's son starting own lobbying business - Client list likely to include Cablevision and horse racing giant Magna Entertainment"

By MARC HUMBERT, Associated Press
First published: Friday, April 1, 2005

ALBANY -- Kenneth Bruno, the son of state Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, said Thursday he has left New York's top-grossing lobbying firm to start his own company.

The younger Bruno said he expected to have some gold-chip clients.

"This is an exciting opportunity and I'm looking forward to continuing to represent my clients effectively," he said.

A leading critic of the influence of highly paid lobbyists on state government said "it is fascinating he is able to break out on his own like this."

"All lobbyists sell access, that's the name of the game," said Blair Horner of the New York Public Interest Research Group.

"What he's pitching his clients, I don't know."

"It certainly doesn't hurt to have the last name Bruno."

Bruno's father is the most powerful Republican in the state Legislature.

The younger Bruno is a former district attorney of Rensselaer County.

Bruno has worked for the last 21 months with the Wilson, Elser, Moskowitz, Edelman and Dicker law-lobbying firm.

That firm took in $6.67 million from lobbying in 2004, according to reports filed with the state Lobbying Commission.

The new firm will be called Albany Strategies, and Bruno said he expects to represent Cablevision, Magna Entertainment, Yonkers Raceway and the New York Ambulette Coalition, among others.

Cablevision owns Madison Square Garden and Magna is one of North America's most powerful companies in the horse racing industry.

"It's highly unusual for someone to break out on their own and have that kind of client list, so he must be providing some service his clients really like," Horner said.

[jeffmoskin]

Iraq.

Fast becoming our 51st state.

Bush may be fooling a whole bunch of Americans about Iraq, but the Middle East people are on to him.

Read on.

The American occupation used its power over the Iraqis to force voter turnout. Dahr Jamal reports Iraqi complaints that officials threatened to cut their monthly food ration if they did not vote. The extortion of Iraqi support for an American-initiated process undermines Bush'sclaim that the elections are for Iraqis benefit only.

Bush does not care that it is illegal under the Geneva Conventions for an occupying power to tamper with a conquered nation's government. He has instigated coups, under the cover of elections, that have empowered partners who will accept Israeli settlement of the West Bank and American bases in Iraq.

Mahmoud Abbas political biography suggests that he will endorse Sharon's plans to annex Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Abbas is an architect of the Oslo Accords that enabled Israel to build many of the settlements that have strangled Palestinian towns. The Bush administration is counting on him to disarm the Palestinian resistance and accept Israeli

Previous American-supported coups in the Middle East--Iran (1953) and Israel's Lebanon invasion (1982)--ended in disaster for the US and its clients. Manipulating the strings of a new set of puppets with a ballot will endear the Arab peoples neither to the US nor the new governments.- Published 31/3/2005 © bitterlemons-international.org

Caise D. Hassan is a Muslim American human rights activist of Palestinian descent. He is currently working on a book on the 1987 intifada.

A.B.

Has anybody reading this thread read Michael Ruppert's "Crossing the Rubicon"?

While there is a lot of speculation, the bottom line is:

1. We are hooked on OIL.

2. It is running out.

3. The Bush/Cheney Junta will do whatever it takes to "secure" Amerika's future needs, even if the Constitution is shredded in the process.


If ONLY we had started weaning ourselves and our profligate ways 30 years ago when we had the first oil shocks, we would NOT be in this situation today.

But that would have taken leadership.

That would have taken sacrifice.

We had neither. Now we are up to our necks, and it is 11 o'clock. Not a pretty picture at all. I wish I could leave my kids something better.

Regarding Israel/Palestine, whatever the resulution is, you can be sure the borders will NOT be the 67 ones. Reason: they are not secure.

I think Sharon's plan is to trade Gaza and some of the Negev for the 200,000+ settlers in East Jerusalem and use that settlement as a "buffer" to provide Israel with the security it would otherwise lack.

[jeffmoskin]

And here, jeffmoskin, I have to say that if it were just my own personal matter that was involved here, I would not bother to waste "community time" by bringing it in here, to discuss!

One of the things IN HERE that is so difficult to assess, of course, since each of us is but a pinprick on a great big globe, OUT THERE, and so has but very limited experience of what the world is really doing at any given minute, IS what PUBLIC SENTIMENT on any given issue really is, IN AREAS OTHER THAN where we ourselves live and reside, and here, I will direct myself to CITIZENSHIP, or what I think it is, anyway, AND HERE IS WHERE A KEY ISSUE OPENS UP, that must be considered by each of us as we communicate IN HERE across state boundaries, OUT THERE, and that is the concept of local rule prevails!

OR SHOULD IT?

This is a CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUE with me, and those with whom I am similarly situated here in New York State, which would be all residents of Rensselaer County, at least, if not all residents of the State of New York, where it is the Attorney General of the State of New York itself who is advocating and defending the use of the "PSYCHIATRIC TAKEDOWN" witness elimination scheme as a political tool of "control" in the State of New York, DESPITE the fact that it violates both State and Federal law, as was noted by Rensselaer County Criminal Court Justice McGrath in the papers that were before the Bush CONSERVATIVE in Federal District Court for the Northern District of New York!

I was BORN in Rensselaer County in the State of New York, and so, I am subject to the laws of the State of New York, and I am entitled to ALL of the protections of the Constitution of the State of New York, REGARDLESS OF WHAT GEORGE W. BUSH  and TOMMY DELAY MAY HAVE TO SAY ABOUT IT, and I cannot be deprived OF ANY of those protections of law, without DUE PROCESS, and yet I was, with the KNOWLEDGE AND CONSENT of the New York State Attorney General!

To "DETER" me from having my Constitutional rights in the State of New York upheld, I was physically assaulted and bodily harmed by a thug, a goon, acting with intent to do me bodily harm, and to further intimidate me from being a witness in Rensselaer County, ON VIDEOTAPE!

On videotape, the goon can clearly be heard to say that he was "protected" in Rensselaer County, and that he could assault me any time that he wanted with impunity!

Subsequently, a New York State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation Investigator saw that videotape, and based upon that videotape, determined that the goon should be arrested!

That never happened, however, and the statements of the New York State Police Investigator were subsequently suppressed by the Office of the New York State Attorney General to hinder prosecution of the thug, and successfully so, to my detriment, AS WELL AS the cause of law and order here in the State of New York, which I am aligned with, AS A CITIZEN OF THIS STATE, pursuant o the provisions of the New York State Constitution!

Judge McGrath, WHO IS THE LOCAL Criminal Court Judge with authority in the matter under the New York State Constitution, questioned and challenged that conduct of the Office of the New York State Attorney General as itself being illegal, and the Bush CONSERVATIVE said, "SO WHAT?"

SAY WHAT?

EXCUSE ME!

"SO WHAT?"

In the context of the whole matter, and who is actually whom in Rensselaer County with respect to making determinations on matters of law and order in the County, PURSUANT TO THE NEW YORK STATE CONSTITUTION, it looks an awful lot to me, as a lifelong resident, that this Bush CONSERVATIVE just told MY local judge to go "**** himself", or "SOD OFF" as the British Royals like to say, and that has me more than a little curious, and concerned here, FOR WHERE DOES a Federal Judge get any authority at all to come down within a state in this union of OURS, ANY STATE, to okay conduct by the State Attorney General that not only strips the state resident of his protections of law in the State of New York, PURSUANT to the New York State Constitution, WITHOUT A SHRED of DUE PROCESS afforded, but borders on the criminal itself, according to the Rensselaer County Criminal Court Justice!

This is much more than just a little incredible here, jeffmoskin, it is a grotesque burlesque, to boot, and more beyond that!

In fact, it is a joke!

A great big joke, and that is what I am supposed to accept as LAW in the State of New York, where I reside, and where I am entitled to the fullest protection of the New York State Constitution while I am a State resident?

No, sorry, I can't, and I won't!

Eliot Spitzer and the State of New York are not "immune" from the operation of law in the State of New York, despite what a Federal Court Judge may have to say about it, and that is really what the issue is with me, jeffmoskin:

STATE'S RIGHTS v. REPUBLICAN-IMPOSED TYRANNY AND OPPRESSION, plain and simple!

LIBERTY IS NOT DIVISIBLE!

Not ever!

Pass it along!

Gore Vidal was interviewed by City Pages:


The Undoing of America

Gore Vidal on war for oil, politics-free elections, and the late, great U.S. Constitution.

by Steve Perry

For the past 40 years or so of Gore Vidal's prolific 59-year literary career, his great project has been the telling of the American story from the country's inception to the present day, unencumbered by the court historian's task of making America's leaders look like good guys at every turn. The saga has unfolded in two ways: through Vidal's series of seven historical novels, beginning with Washington DC in 1967 and concluding with The Golden Age in 2000; and through his ceaseless essay writing and public appearances across the years. Starting around 1970, Vidal began to offer up his own annual State of the Union message, in magazines and on the talk circuit. His words were always well-chosen, provocative, and contentious: "There is not one human problem that could not be solved," he told an interviewer in 1972, "if people would simply do as I advise."

Though it's a dim memory now, Vidal and commentators of a similarly outspoken bent used to be regulars on television news shows. Vidal's most famous TV moment came during the 1968 Democratic Convention, when ABC paired him with William F. Buckley on live television. On the next to last night of the convention, the dialogue turned to the question of some student war protesters raising a Vietcong flag. The following exchange ensued:


Vidal: "As far as I'm concerned, the only sort of proto- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself. Failing that, I'll only say that we can't have--"

Buckley: "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered."


That was TV in the pre-Information Age for you. These days Vidal, who put his Italian villa on the market a few months ago and moved full-time to his home in Los Angeles, speaks mostly through his essay writing about the foreign and stateside adventures of the Bush administration. In the past five years he has published one major nonfiction collection, The Last Empire, and a book about the founding fathers called Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson. But mainly he has stayed busy producing what he calls his "political pamphlets," a series of short essay collections called Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated (2002), Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta (2003), and Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia (2004). Last month at Duke University, he produced a short run of On the March to the Sea, an older play about the Civil War that he has rewritten entirely.

I spoke to Vidal, who will turn 80 this October, by phone from his home in Los Angeles on March 9.


City Pages: I'll start with the broadest of questions: Why are we in Iraq, and what are our prospects there at this point?

Gore Vidal: Well, let us say that the old American republic is well and truly dead. The institutions that we thought were eternal proved not to be. And that goes for the three departments of government, and it also goes for the Bill of Rights. So we're in uncharted territory. We're governed by public relations. Very little information gets to the people, thanks to the corruption and/or ineptitude of the media. Just look at this bankruptcy thing that went through--everybody in debt to credit cards, which is apparently 90 percent of the country, is in deep trouble. So the people are uninformed about what's being done in their name.

And that's really why we are in Iraq. Iraq is a symptom, not a cause. It's a symptom of the passion we have for oil, which is a declining resource in the world. Alternatives can be found, but they will not be found as long as there's one drop of oil or natural gas to be extracted from other nations, preferably by force by the current junta in charge of our affairs. Iraq will end with our defeat.


CP: You've observed many times in your writing that the United States has elections but has no politics. Could you talk about what you mean by that, and about how so many people have come to accept a purely spectatorial relationship to politics, more like fans (or non-fans) than citizens?

Gore Vidal: Well, you cannot have a political party that is not based upon a class interest. It has been part of the American propaganda machine that we have no class system. Yes, there are rich people; some are richer than others. But there is no class system. We're classless. You could be president tomorrow. So could Michael Jackson, or this one or that one. This isn't true. We have a very strong, very rigid class structure which goes back to the beginning of the country. I will not go into the details of that, but there it is. Whether it's good or bad is something else.

We have not had a political party since that, really, of the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, who was a member of the highest class, an aristocrat who had made common cause with the people, who were in the midst of depression, not to mention the Dust Bowl, which had taken so many farms in the '30s. We were a country in deep trouble, and he represented those in deep trouble. He got together great majorities and was elected four times to the presidency. And launched us on empire--somewhat consciously, too. He saw to it that the European colonial empires would break up, and that we would inherit bits and pieces, which we have done.

If we don't have class interests officially, then therefore we have no political parties. What is the Republican Party? Well, it used to be the party of the small-town businessman, generally in the Middle West, generally sort of out of the mainstream. Very conservative. It now represents nothing but the gas and oil business. They own it. And the people who go to Congress are simply bought. They are lawyers who are paid to represent Halliburton, big oil, big banking. So the very rich corporate America has a party for itself, the Republican Party. The Democrats don't have much of anything but a kind of wistful style. They just want everyone to be happy, and politically correct at all times. Do not hurt other people's feelings. They spend so much time on political correctness that they haven't thought of what to do politically about anything. Like say "no" to these preemptive wars, which are against not only the whole world's take on war and peace, but against United States history.

This is something new under the sun--that a president, just because he feels like it, can declare war on anybody. And Congress will go along with him, and the courts will support him. The founding fathers would be mortified if they saw what had happened to their handiwork, which wasn't very great to begin with but is now done for. When you have preemptive wars, and you have ambitious companies like Bechtel who will build up what, let us say, General Electric has helped to destroy with its weaponry--these interests are well-represented.

There is no people's party, and you can't even use the word. "Liberal" has been demonized. A liberal is a commie who's also a pedophile. Being a communist and a pedophile, he's so busy that he hasn't got time to win an election and is odious to boot. So there is no Democratic Party. We hope that something might happen with the governor of Vermont, and maybe something will or maybe it won't. But we are totally censored, and the press just follows this. It observes what those in power want it to observe, and turns the other way when things get dark. Then, when it's too late sometimes, you get some very good reporting. But by then, somebody's playing taps.


CP: Has the media played a role in transforming citizens into spectators of this process?

Vidal: Well, they have been transformed, by design, by corporate America, aided by the media, which belongs to corporate America. They are no longer citizens. They are hardly voters. They are consumers, and they consume those things which are advertised on television. They are made to sound like happy consumers. Listen to TV advertising: This one says, "I had this terrible pain, but when I put on Kool-Aid, I found relief overnight. You must try it too." All we do is hear about little cures for little pains. Nothing important gets said. There used to be all those talk shows back in the '50s and '60s, when I was on television a great deal. People would talk about many important things, and you had some very good talkers. They're not allowed on now. Or they're set loose in the Fox Zoo, in which you have a number of people who pretend to be journalists but are really like animals. Each one has his own noise--there's the donkey who brays, there's the pig who squeals. Each one is a different animal in a zoo, making a characteristic noise. The result is chaos, which is what is intended. They don't want the people to know anything, and the people don't.


CP: You wrote at the end of a 2002 essay that so-called inalienable rights, once alienated, are often lost forever. Can you describe what's changed about America during the Bush years that represent permanent, or at least long-term, legacies that will survive Bush?

Vidal: Well, the Congress has ceded--which it cannot do--but it has ceded its power to declare war. That is written in the Constitution. It's the most important thing in the Constitution, ultimately. And having ceded that to the Executive Branch, he can declare war whenever he finds terrorism. Now, terrorism is a wonderful invention because it doesn't mean anything. It's an abstract noun. You can't have a war against an abstract noun; it's like having a war against dandruff. It's meaningless.

But you can terrify people. The art of government now, the art of control as practiced by the current junta, is: Keep the people frightened. It's exactly what Adolf Hitler and his gang did. Keep them frightened: The Russians are coming. The Poles are killing Germans who live within the borders of Poland. The Czechs are doing the same thing in the Sudetenland. These are evil people. We must go after them. We must save our kin.

Keep everybody frightened, tell them lies--and the bigger the lie, the more they'll believe it. There's nothing the average American now believes (because he's been told it 10,000 times a day) that is true. Now how do you undo so much disinformation? Well, you have to have truth squads at work 24 hours a day every day. And we don't have them.


CP: I'd like to ask you to sketch our political arc from Reagan down to Bush II. It seemed to me that Reagan took a big step down the road to Bush when he was so successful in selling the ideology of the market, the idea that whatever the interests of money and markets dictated was the proper and even the most patriotic course--which was hardly a new idea, but one that had never been embraced openly as a first principle of politics. Is that a fair assessment?

Vidal: He was small-town American Republican, even though he started life as a Democrat. He believed in the values of Main Street. Sinclair Lewis's novels are filled with Ronald Reagans, though Babbitt doesn't get to the White House. But this time Babbitt did. So it was very congenial for Reagan to play that part, not that he had a very clear idea of what his lines were all about. Those who were writing the scenarios certainly knew.

I'd say the downward skid certainly began with Reagan. I came across a comment recently, someone asking why we had gone into both Grenada and Panama, two absolutely nothing little countries who were no danger to us, minding their own business, and we go in and conquer them. Somebody said, well, we did it because we could. That's the attitude of our current rulers.

So they will be forever putting--what they do is put us all at risk. You and I and other civilians are going to be the ones who are killed when the Moslems get really angry and start suicide-bombing American cities because of things the Bush/Cheney junta has done to them. We will be the ones killed. Bush/Cheney will be safe in their bunkers, but we're going to get it. I would have thought that self-interest--since Americans are the most easily terrified people on earth, as recently demonstrated over and over again-- we would be afraid of what was going to befall us. But I think simultaneously we have no imagination, and certainly no sense of cause and effect. If we did have that, we might know that if you keep kicking somebody, he's going to kick you back. So there we stand, ignoring the first rule of physics, which is that there is no action without reaction.


CP: Didn't the previous successes of our economy and our empire, post WWII, condition people to expect that consequences were for other people in other places?

Vidal: Well, wishful thinking, perhaps. I spent three years in World War II, and it was a clear victory for our team. But it was nothing to write Mother about, I'll tell you. Walt Whitman once said, of the Civil War, that it is a lucky thing the people will never know what happened in the war. One can think of a lot of things, one can imagine a lot of things, but...

The sense that there are no consequences--that can happen if you keep the people diverted. Television changed everything. Some 60 or 80 percent of Americans still think Saddam Hussein was a partner of Osama bin Laden. They hated each other, and they had nothing to do with each other. Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. But if you keep repeating it and repeating it--and Cheney still does; nobody's switched him off, so he just babbles and babbles like a broken toy--how are they to know otherwise? Yes, there are good journals here and there, like The Nation, but they're not easily found. And with our educational system, I don't think the average person can read with any great ease anything that requires thought and the ability to exercise cause-and-effect reasoning: If we do this to them, they will do that to us. We seem to have lost all track of that rather primitive notion that I think people all the way back to chimpanzees have known. But we don't.


CP: In your latest book, Imperial America, you refer to Confucius's admonition to "rectify the language." In that regard I'm wondering about the Clinton years, and about the success of the Clinton/Morris strategy of "triangulation," which mainly consisted of talking to the left and governing to the right. Did that play a role in setting the stage for a figure like Bush, who throws around words like "democracy" and "freedom" when they bear no relation to reality?

Vidal: Well, certainly it did. Clinton represented no opposition to this. He was so busy triangulating that he was enlisting under the colors of the other team, hoping to pick up some votes. I don't think he did, but he got himself reelected by not doing the job of an opposing political party. In other words, the Republican Party as it now is funded, is the party of corporate America, which is no friend to the people of America. Now that's a clear division. The people of America, if you ever run for office, you find out they're very shrewd about figuring out who's getting what money, and who's on their side. But you have to organize them. You have to tell them more things than they get to know from the general media.

Clinton just gave up. Also, to his credit, or rather, to explain him, the Republican Party realized that this was the most attractive politician since Franklin Roosevelt, and that he had a great, great hold over people. They also realized that if he got going, we really would have National Health--we would actually become a civilized country, which we are nowhere near. I mean, we're in the Stone Age again. He was working toward it, and they saw he had to be destroyed. Later they got a cock-sucking interlude to impeach him. If I were he, I would have called out the Army and sent Congress home.


CP: Really.

Vidal: Yes, really. They went beyond anything in the laws of impeachment. They have to do with the exercise of your powers as president, abuses of power as president. He wasn't abusing any powers. He was caught telling a little lie about sex, which you're not supposed to ask him about anyway, and he shouldn't have answered. So they use that: oh, perjury! Oh, it's terrible, a president who lies! Oh, God--how can we live any longer in Sodom and Gomorrah? You can play on the dumb-dumbs morning, noon, and night with stuff like that.


CP: Clearly Bush does represent something radical and new, and there's been an understandable tendency on the part of people who don't like where the country is going to focus their outrage exclusively on Bush and the Republicans. But don't the media and the Democrats come in for a great deal of blame for creating the political vacuum in which he rose?

Vidal: Well, the media is on the other side. The media belongs to the big money, and the big money, their candidates, their party, is the Republican Party as now constituted. So everybody is behaving typically [in media]. What isn't typical is a Democratic Party that has also sold out. There are just as many lobbyists and propagandists there as on the other side. They're never going to regain anything until they remember that they're supposed to represent the people at large, and not the very rich.

But they need the very rich in order to be able to run for office, to buy television time. I'd say if you really want to date the crash of the American system, the American republic, it was in the early '50s, when television suddenly emerged as the central fact of American life. That which was not televised did not exist. And any preacher, because religion is tax-free--I would tax all the religions, by the way--any evangelical who wants to get up there and say, send me millions of dollars and I will cure you of your dandruff, he gets to spend the money any way he likes, and there's no tax on it. So he can have political action groups, which he's not supposed to have but does have. So you have all that religious money, and then you have the enormous cost of campaigning, which means every politician who wants to buy TV time has got to sell his ass to somebody. And corporate America is ready to buy.


CP: Likewise, there's a great tendency among his detractors to call Bush stupid. You've called him "dumb," albeit not as dumb as his dad. But I'm recalling what you wrote about Ronald Reagan years ago in your review of the Ronnie Leamer book about him: that no one who's stupid aces every career test he faces. The same is clearly not true of George W. Bush, who had failed in a lot of things before he entered politics. But he hasn't failed in politics. Do you think Bush possesses a kind of intelligence akin to Reagan's in that regard, or is that giving him too much credit? How do you think his mind works?

Vidal: I should think very oddly. He's dyslexic, which means--it's a problem of incoherence. I have some dyslexia in my family, and they can be reasonably intelligent about most things, but they have problems with words, the structure of language. Not really getting it. There's an inability to study anything. Sometimes they also have an attention deficiency and so on.

I would say that he is undisturbed by these things. His is a mind totally lacking in culture of any kind. I'm not talking about highbrow culture, just knowledge of the American past, and our institutions. He's got rid of due process of law, which is what the United States is based upon. Once you can send somebody off and put them in the brig of a ship in Charleston Harbor and hold them as long as you like uncharged, you have destroyed the United States and its Constitution. He has done those things.


CP: How did so many Americans come to embrace and even celebrate these bullying, anti-democratic displays of authoritarian, censorial governance? There's a palpable sense of mean- spiritedness about a good deal of public sentiment, it seems.

Vidal: I wouldn't call it the public. There are groups that rather like it. And these are the same groups that don't like black people, gay people, Jews, or this or that. You always have that disaffected minority that you can play to. And it helps you in states with small populations. If you get eight of those states, you don't get much of a popular vote, but you can get the Electoral College--a device that our founders made to make sure we never had a democratic government. In other words, I don't blame the public. He's not popular. I've just been reading a report on Conyers's trip to Ohio with his subcommittee's experts. Ohio was stolen. The Republican Congress will never have a hearing on it. But I think attempts are being made to publish the details of what was done there, and elsewhere too in America.

In other words, I put the case that Bush was never elected--not in 2000, and not in 2004. This is a new game in the world. Through the magic of electronic voting, particularly through Mr. Diebold and friends, you can take a non-president and make him president. But how to keep the people, including the opposition who should know better, so silent, this introduces us to a vast landscape of corruption which I dare not enter.


CP: I saw a recent CIA report that referred to the United States as a "declining superpower." To your knowledge, has the government ever said so before?

Vidal: Well, their style is hortatory and alarmist. And I think they say we're declining every day and every minute. We must do this, we must overthrow this government, we must do that, stop China. Why not nuke China? [The American right] was all set to do that at one point, I remember. William F. Buckley Jr. was in favor of a unilateral strike at their nuclear capacity. A whole bunch of people, moderately respectable, were in favor of that. It all comes from propaganda. It all comes from knowing how to use the media to your own ends, and keep the people frightened.

It was very striking--before the inauguration, CNN showed a bunch of inaugural addresses starting with Roosevelt. Roosevelt was a master politician. What theme does he hit first? "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Well, that's it. He intuited it, having followed the Nazis and knowing how Hitler was putting together his act, which was creating fear in the Germans of everybody else so he could mobilize them and make the SS. Roosevelt was saying that it was this unnameable fear that we had to watch out for. Then we skip over to Harry Truman, a real dunce, but there was a genius behind him in Dean Acheson. We jump over to him, and he is declaring war on communism, all over the world. They're on the march! Wherever you look, there they are, and we must be on our guard!

He instituted loyalty oaths for everybody--for janitors in high schools as well as members of the cabinet. Unthinkable, the distance from Roosevelt to his admittedly despised successor. We've gone from, we must not succumb to fear itself, to the next one saying, oh, there's so much to be afraid of! We must arm! We must militarize America and its economy, which he did.


CP: One theory about the reason the US invaded Iraq concerns currency--the fear that European deals for Iraqi oil might lead to oil's being denominated in euros rather than dollars. Do you think that notion holds any water?

Vidal: I do. Perhaps more oil than water, but yes, that's what it's about--the terror that Europe...Europe, after all, is more populous than the United States, better educated, better quality of life for most of its citizens. And it has actually achieved, here and there, a civilization, which we haven't. There's a lot of nasty response on the part of those Americans who are eager for more oil, more money, more this, more that, to put Europe down, to regard Europe as a rival and perhaps as an enemy. It was America that saw to it that we got a weak dollar, though. The Europeans had nothing to do with it. In fact they were rather appalled, because they own an awful lot of treasury bonds that will be worthless one day.

So yes, it was a power struggle. Ultimately the whole thing is about oil. We should be looking to hydrogen, or whatever is the latest replacement for fossil fuels. All the money we put into these wars in the Middle East, we should have put into that. Then we wouldn't be so desperate at the thought that in 2020, or in 2201 or whenever, there will be no more oil.


CP: Talk a little more about public education's decay in the current scene. Much of the Bush administration's spending on No Child Left Behind is earmarked for private corporate tutors.

Vidal: I don't think Bush himself is particularly relevant to any of this, since he avoided education entirely throughout his life. Which gives him a sort of purity. He was a cheerleader at Andover, where he learned many skills that have been very useful to him since.

The educational system was pretty good once. I never went to a public school, and the private schools here are generally good, though we are also better indoctrinated than the public schools. It certainly got bad around the '50s. Just as we became a global empire, the first thing I was struck by was that they stopped teaching geography in public schools. Now here we are a global power, and nobody knows where anything is. I loved geography when I was a kid. It's really the way to get to know the world. The success of Franklin Roosevelt was that he was a great philatelist. He collected stamps, and he knew where all the countries were and who lived in them. Now we have people who don't know where anything is. I remember a speech Bush gave in which he was reaching out not only to the "Torks" but the "Grecians" at some point. We live in total confusion time.

There is also something in the water--let us hope it was put there by the enemy--that has made Americans contemptuous of intelligence whenever they recognize it, which is not very often. And a hatred of learning, which you don't find in any other country. There is not one hamlet in Italy in which you can fail to find kids desperate to learn. Yes, there are areas where they might be desperate to become members of the Mafia, but that's because they don't have any money. And a country like Italy is not rich, not as rich as we are. But there isn't a kid in Italy who can't quote Dante. There's no one in America now who knows who Shakespeare is, because they stopped teaching him in high schools.

So we are out of it. And no attempt is being made to put us back into it.


CP: When does this current bout of foreign adventurism end? You've said in other interviews that it ends with us going broke. Can you explain?

Vidal: I haven't changed my line. We don't have the money for these adventures. We don't even have the money to operate those prisons which are the delight of Iraq. All we were doing at Abu Ghraib was export what we do to our own people in our own prisons, you know. We are sharing with the rest of the world penology-- in every sense. No, there isn't the money to do it. And the few who are making most of the money are probably investing it elsewhere, preparing islands for themselves to escape to. And then their followers, who are not very many, will be experiencing rapture. They won't be here.


CP: Is there any winning back some semblance of the older republic at this point?

Vidal: You have to have people who want it, and I can't find many people who do.


CP: What can average people do about this state of affairs at present, if anything?

Vidal: Well, some of the internet has been very useful. Radio has been very useful. There are means of getting things across. It's why I write those little books of mine, the pamphlets as I call them. Our first form of politics was pamphleteering in the 18th century. They serve a purpose--more pamphlets, more readers, more this, more that. There's a battle to do an interesting kind of guide to the American centuries, and how we got where we are and how we can get out of it. I'm engaged with some people working on that. Further, deponent sayeth not.

[Livyjr]

Though it's a dim memory now, Vidal and commentators of a similarly outspoken bent used to be regulars on television news shows.

Vidal's most famous TV moment came during the 1968 Democratic Convention, when ABC paired him with William F. Buckley on live television.

On the next to last night of the convention, the dialogue turned to the question of some student war protesters raising a Vietcong flag.

The following exchange ensued:

Vidal: "As far as I'm concerned, the only sort of proto- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself.

Failing that, I'll only say that we can't have--"

Buckley: "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered."

An interesting post, indeed, jeffmoskin, with a lot of food for thought in it!

I was in the U.S. Army in 1968, getting ready to be able to go and fulfill my role as "CHUM" in Viet Nam, or "cannon fodder", or a "bullet sponge", and so missed out on this particular HAPPENING above, and in fact, I was completely unaware of it even taking place, UNTIL NOW!

SO!

How about that for CULTURAL IGNORANCE on my part?

And all I can add is that now, today, up here in the State of New York anyway, thanks to a CONSERVATIVE Bush-appointed Judge, Buckley wouldn't even have to lift a finger against Vidal.

All he would have to do instead would be to wink, and the REPUBLICANS would have one of their PET DOCTORS issue an order to have Vidal locked up in a state-sponsored secure mental facility, or GULAG, as they are lovingly known by the huddled masses up here, and all would be well in Buckley's world, and that would be that!

SUA SPONTE: Of his, or its, own WILL OR MOTION, voluntarily, without prompting, or suggestion!

"THE GOVERNMENT DOES NO WRONG!"

"ANYONE WHO BELIEVES THAT THE GOVERMENT CAN DO WRONG, IS WRONG!"

"ANYONE WHO DARES TRY USE THE COURTS OF THE GOVERNMENT TO SHOW THAT THE GOVERNMENT IS WRONG SHALL FIND THEMSELVES SUBJECT TO THE CENSURE OF THE COURTS OF THE GOVERNMENT, FOR IMPUGNING THE GOVERNMENT, WHICH CAN DO NO WRONG!"

Ahhh.

Yes.

I see!

I understand!

SUA SPONTE!

[Livyjr]

And getting back into the "BIGGER" picture of Life in OUR America, we have as follows, and no surprise, I think, anyway, as this position taken by the Pope in this matter of George W. Bush's unprovoked assault and invasion of Iraq was shared by a good chunk of humanity on the face of this earth, and rightly so!

Acts of tyranny and oppression by despots are still despised by freedom-loving human beings on this earth of OURS all these hundreds of years after the tyrannical and despotic English were kicked out of this country, and yet, the lesson still never seems to be learned, by the despots, that they are neither wanted, nor needed, in this world of OURS, that the Pope shared with us!

Politics - AFP

"US envoy says pope considered Iraq war 'defeat for humanity'"

1 hour, 51 minutes ago

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - The former US envoy to the Vatican, Jim Nicholson, recalled Pope John Paul II's vocal opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq on the grounds that war represented a "defeat for humanity."

"There was a clear disagreement," Nicholson said of the rift between the Vatican and the White House over the use of military force to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein.

The pope, who died Saturday, "was a man of peace, and he always hoped for the peace option," Nicholson said in an interview with the Denver Post.

"If he could keep war from breaking out, there's always a chance that peace would break out," Nicholson said.

"That was his position about Iraq; he made that clear to me."

"He also said that war is a defeat for humanity, that war is not always inevitable."

In a failed attempt to sway President George W. Bush from a military strike, the pope had sent an emissary to Washington in the run-up to the war.

"The president had a great deal of respect for the pope, so he took it very seriously," Nicholson said in a separate interview with CNN.

Although differences emerged over Iraq, Nicholson said the pope had been "very supportive" of the US-led war on terror launched after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

During an audience with the pope just days after the attacks, Nicholson said the pontiff had offered his condolences to the American people and condemned the terrorist action as "an attack on humanity."

He also suggested that the pope and President Bush had forged a close bond, especially over their shared commitment to encouraging a "culture of life."

[Livyjr]

And turning to more immediate matters for us, as the Pope is now gone, and Iraq in fact, was invaded, despite whatever the Pope may have thought about it; what does this following story bode for OUR future, besides yet more lurid tales of yet more corporate scandal, here in the "ethically loosey-goosey" America of the ANTINOMIAN PRIME and the Fabulous Bush Co.'s, and yes, "BIG TOMMY", too:

Business - Reuters

"Fannie Mae Investigation Widens"

2 hours, 36 minutes ago

By Kristin Roberts

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal investigators probing accounting problems at Fannie Mae (NYSE:FNM) are now questioning how the No. 1 U.S. home finance company treated trusts that it set up to sell securities.

Shares of Fannie Mae tumbled more than 6 percent on the news, briefly dropping $3.28 to $49.96 on Monday before recovering to $50.80, off 4.5 percent in late morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

The stock had not been below $50 since August 2000.

Fannie's U.S. regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, said on Monday it was investigating the company's use of "qualifying special purpose entities" to account for trusts it uses to issue mortgage-backed securities.

That accounting issue is now just one of dozens being reviewed by investigators both outside and inside the company, according to sources close to Fannie Mae.

The magnitude of accounting problems at the company remains unclear.

But Fannie has already estimated that problems identified so far could result in a profit restatement of more than $11 billion.

Sources close to the various investigations of the company's accounting say the restatement may be much larger.

On Monday, Fannie's regulator said it was examining how the shareholder-owned, government-sponsored housing enterprise accounted for trusts as "qualifying special purpose entities" under Financial Accounting Standard (FAS) 140.

By treating them as "qualifying special purpose entities," Fannie kept the trusts' assets and liabilities off the corporate balance sheet.

OFHEO would not comment on what questions it is raising about Fannie's treatment of the trusts, saying only that it was looking at Fannie's employment of FAS 140.

"QSBEs are one of a number of issues OFHEO is looking at," said Corinne Russell, spokeswoman for OFHEO.

The trusts are used by Fannie Mae to issue mortgage-backed securities, which it creates by purchasing mortgages in the secondary market and then putting them into trusts for sale as mortgage-backed securities.

If regulators find Fannie should have accounted for those trusts on its balance sheet, it would substantially boost the amount of capital the company must hold, as its capital cushion is determined in part by the total assets on its books.

GROWING QUESTIONS

The investigation by OFHEO first focused on Fannie's compliance with two sets of accounting rules -- Financial Accounting Standards (FAS) No. 91 on accounting for fees and costs associated with originating or acquiring loans, and FAS 133 on accounting for derivatives and hedging activities.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in December agreed with OFHEO, saying Fannie's accounting failed to comply with those standards.

But problems did not stop there.

In March, Fannie said its regulator had found more problems with the company's accounting and that questions have grown to include issues with at least five accounting standards.

The regulator also has found instances in which Fannie Mae employees falsified signatures on accounting ledgers and made changes to earnings-related records without following proper procedures.

end quotes

FANNIE MAE!

DOING "IT",

THE NEW AMERICAN "WAY"!

COOK, COOK, COOK, THOSE COMPANY BOOKS!


LOOT, LOOT, LOOT, THAT COMPANY RIGHT TO DEATH!

Go Fannie, yeah right, shake that thing!

[Livyjr]

Business - Reuters

"Fannie Mae Investigation Widens"

By Kristin Roberts

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal investigators probing accounting problems at Fannie Mae (NYSE:FNM) are now questioning how the No. 1 U.S. home finance company treated trusts that it set up to sell securities.

In March, Fannie said its regulator had found more problems with the company's accounting and that questions have grown to include issues with at least five accounting standards.

The regulator also has found instances in which Fannie Mae employees falsified signatures on accounting ledgers and made changes to earnings-related records without following proper procedures.

CORPORATE AMERICA!

The home of liars, chiselers, looters, misbegottens .......

Let's see, have I missed anyone?

[Livyjr]

And turning to more immediate matters for us, as the Pope is now gone, and Iraq in fact, was invaded, despite whatever the Pope may have thought about it; what does this following story bode for OUR future, besides yet more lurid tales of yet more corporate scandal, here in the "ethically loosey-goosey" America of the ANTINOMIAN PRIME and the Fabulous Bush Co.'s, and yes, "BIG TOMMY", too:

Business - Reuters

"Fannie Mae Investigation Widens"

By Kristin Roberts

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal investigators probing accounting problems at Fannie Mae (NYSE:FNM) are now questioning how the No. 1 U.S. home finance company treated trusts that it set up to sell securities.

Shares of Fannie Mae tumbled more than 6 percent on the news, briefly dropping $3.28 to $49.96 on Monday before recovering to $50.80, off 4.5 percent in late morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

The stock had not been below $50 since August 2000.

The magnitude of accounting problems at the company remains unclear.

But Fannie has already estimated that problems identified so far could result in a profit restatement of more than $11 billion.

Sources close to the various investigations of the company's accounting say the restatement may be much larger.

The regulator also has found instances in which Fannie Mae employees falsified signatures on accounting ledgers and made changes to earnings-related records without following proper procedures.

And borrowing some relevant portions from jeffmoskin's post above, in response to these two stories above here:

CP: I'd like to ask you to sketch our political arc from Reagan down to Bush II.

It seemed to me that Reagan took a big step down the road to Bush when he was so successful in selling the ideology of the market, the idea that whatever the interests of money and markets dictated was the proper and even the most patriotic course--which was hardly a new idea, but one that had never been embraced openly as a first principle of politics.

Is that a fair assessment?

Vidal: He was small-town American Republican, even though he started life as a Democrat.

He believed in the values of Main Street.

Sinclair Lewis's novels are filled with Ronald Reagans, though Babbitt doesn't get to the White House.

But this time Babbitt did.

So it was very congenial for Reagan to play that part, not that he had a very clear idea of what his lines were all about.

Those who were writing the scenarios certainly knew.

I'd say the downward skid certainly began with Reagan.

I came across a comment recently, someone asking why we had gone into both Grenada and Panama, two absolutely nothing little countries who were no danger to us, minding their own business, and we go in and conquer them.

Somebody said, well, we did it because we could.

That's the attitude of our current rulers.

So they will be forever putting--what they do is put us all at risk.

You and I and other civilians are going to be the ones who are killed when the Moslems get really angry and start suicide-bombing American cities because of things the Bush/Cheney junta has done to them.

We will be the ones killed.

Bush/Cheney will be safe in their bunkers, but we're going to get it.

I would have thought that self-interest--since Americans are the most easily terrified people on earth, as recently demonstrated over and over again-- we would be afraid of what was going to befall us.

But I think simultaneously we have no imagination, and certainly no sense of cause and effect.

If we did have that, we might know that if you keep kicking somebody, he's going to kick you back.

So there we stand, ignoring the first rule of physics, which is that there is no action without reaction.

CP: Didn't the previous successes of our economy and our empire, post WWII, condition people to expect that consequences were for other people in other places?

Vidal: Well, wishful thinking, perhaps.

I spent three years in World War II, and it was a clear victory for our team.

But it was nothing to write Mother about, I'll tell you.

Walt Whitman once said, of the Civil War, that it is a lucky thing the people will never know what happened in the war.

One can think of a lot of things, one can imagine a lot of things, but...

The sense that there are no consequences--that can happen if you keep the people diverted.

Television changed everything.

Some 60 or 80 percent of Americans still think Saddam Hussein was a partner of Osama bin Laden.

They hated each other, and they had nothing to do with each other.

Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11.

But if you keep repeating it and repeating it--and Cheney still does; nobody's switched him off, so he just babbles and babbles like a broken toy--how are they to know otherwise?

Yes, there are good journals here and there, like The Nation, but they're not easily found.

And with our educational system, I don't think the average person can read with any great ease anything that requires thought and the ability to exercise cause-and-effect reasoning:

If we do this to them, they will do that to us.

We seem to have lost all track of that rather primitive notion that I think people all the way back to chimpanzees have known.

But we don't.

[Livyjr]

Some years ago, when I was working on my Master's Degree in Engineering, I was working on a "project" that dealt with the "plumes" from nuclear generating station "cooling towers", which are quite huge affairs, as anyone who lives or travels across Pennsylvania can tell you, since that is one state where they are readily visible!

In the course of that project work, I became aware of "something" that in a sense "shocked" me, although engineers are not really supposed to get "shocked", and it greatly interested me, as well, because of the magnitude of what I was seeing through my project work, which was unpublished for reasons beyond my control, and that was the sheer volume of liquid water, and vapor, that just one of these towers alone could put way up into OUR earth's upper atmosphere, on a fairly continuous basis, where such water in such volume did not formerly exist!

"WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN TO ALL THAT WATER", is what I thought way back then, which would have been 1975!

Well, how about this?

"Floods swamp parts of Northeast - New Jersey hardest hit; New York, Pennsylvania also see trouble"

Waren Westura / AP

New Jersey's Ramapo River, seen here at Pompton Lakes, was among the rivers that burst their banks due to heavy rain over the weekend. The Ramapo burst over its spillway and onto an access road.

The Associated Press

Updated: 12:48 p.m. ET April 4, 2005

TRENTON, N.J. - Flooding forced hundreds of people from their homes Monday in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and closed the New Jersey Statehouse and several nearby state office buildings.

Flooding also closed schools and roads and chased hundreds of their homes in eastern New York state, where three people were missing.

And the same weekend storm system that drove rivers out of their banks with torrential rain piled more than 2 feet of snow on southwestern New York and northwestern Pennsylvania.

New Jersey’s acting Gov. Richard J. Codey declared a state of emergency.

Flood warnings were in effect for parts of northern New Jersey and eastern and central Pennsylvania as some streams were still rising.

Among the areas hardest hit by the flooding were Wayne, in northeastern New Jersey, where hundreds of residents were urged to leave their homes in low-lying areas, and Trenton, along the Delaware River, where some 2,100 evacuees might not be able to return home for several days.

“It’s fair to say that, in the best-case scenario, Wednesday night some houses may be available, but it’s probably going to be Thursday or Friday,” said Brian Hughes, Mercer County executive.

In northern New Jersey’s Lincoln Park, more than 400 people fled to drier ground, said Ellen Harrigan, the town’s emergency management coordinator.

The Passaic River was not expected to peak until Monday night, she said.

About 170 families were forced from their homes in Oakland by the rising Ramapo River, Bergen County spokesman Brian Hague said.

On the west bank of the Delaware River, residents and business owners in Easton, Pa., waded through waist-deep water Monday to assess the damage to their property.

Many streams in central and eastern Pennsylvania rose out of their banks, but communities along the Delaware got the worst of it.

Many locals said the damage was worse than what was caused by Hurricane Ivan in September.

“It was like someone was taking a squeegee and just pushing the water forward,” said Bertram King, 20, one of about 15 people evacuated from a homeless shelter in Easton.

800 evacuated

Farther upstream on the Delaware, about 800 people were evacuated from their homes Sunday in Port Jervis, N.Y.

At least 100 of them spent the night at Port Jervis High School.

And at Cincinnatus, N.Y., about 20 miles east of Cortland, the Otselic River flooded a nursing home, forcing out about 35 residents.

High water also closed roads and several schools in eastern New York’s Hudson Valley.

Police in Deposit, N.Y., near the Pennsylvania line, resumed a search Monday for two men whose van was swept away by a creek on Sunday.

To the southeast, in Ulster County, a 57-year-old woman was swept away by high water and remained missing Monday.

Farther west, the storm’s precipitation fell as snow.

Residents of southwest New York’s Chautauqua County were digging out Monday from as much as 26 inches of wet, heavy snow.

Several thousand utility customers lost electricity in the area south of Buffalo, N.Y., because the dense, sticky snow snapped power lines.

In nearby Erie County, Pa., 19 inches of snow fell at Waterford and Corry got 14.

Hundreds of motorists were stranded for hours Sunday on a 22-mile stretch of Interstate 90 between Erie and the New York line.

About 26,000 customers had no power Monday in Erie County and many weren’t expected to be back in service until Tuesday.

Parts of the area have had about 7 inches of rain in the last 30 days, with most of it since March 23, said David A. Robinson, the New Jersey state climatologist.

“In the last two weeks, we’ve had more than a month and a half of rainfall, with some snow melt in there,” he said.

[jeffmoskin]

An interesting post, indeed, jeffmoskin, with a lot of food for thought in it!

Yes but the elements I wanted to emphasize were:


1. "CP: Has the media played a role in transforming citizens into spectators of this process?

Vidal: Well, they have been transformed, by design, by corporate America, aided by the media, which belongs to corporate America. They are no longer citizens. They are hardly voters. They are consumers, and they consume those things which are advertised on television. They are made to sound like happy consumers. Listen to TV advertising: This one says, "I had this terrible pain, but when I put on Kool-Aid, I found relief overnight. You must try it too." All we do is hear about little cures for little pains. Nothing important gets said. There used to be all those talk shows back in the '50s and '60s, when I was on television a great deal. People would talk about many important things, and you had some very good talkers. They're not allowed on now. Or they're set loose in the Fox Zoo, in which you have a number of people who pretend to be journalists but are really like animals. Each one has his own noise--there's the donkey who brays, there's the pig who squeals. Each one is a different animal in a zoo, making a characteristic noise. The result is chaos, which is what is intended. They don't want the people to know anything, and the people don't."

And:

2. "CP: You wrote at the end of a 2002 essay that so-called inalienable rights, once alienated, are often lost forever. Can you describe what's changed about America during the Bush years that represent permanent, or at least long-term, legacies that will survive Bush?

Vidal: Well, the Congress has ceded--which it cannot do--but it has ceded its power to declare war. That is written in the Constitution. It's the most important thing in the Constitution, ultimately. And having ceded that to the Executive Branch, he can declare war whenever he finds terrorism. Now, terrorism is a wonderful invention because it doesn't mean anything. It's an abstract noun. You can't have a war against an abstract noun; it's like having a war against dandruff. It's meaningless.

But you can terrify people. The art of government now, the art of control as practiced by the current junta, is: Keep the people frightened. It's exactly what Adolf Hitler and his gang did. Keep them frightened: The Russians are coming. The Poles are killing Germans who live within the borders of Poland. The Czechs are doing the same thing in the Sudetenland. These are evil people. We must go after them. We must save our kin.

Keep everybody frightened, tell them lies--and the bigger the lie, the more they'll believe it. There's nothing the average American now believes (because he's been told it 10,000 times a day) that is true. Now how do you undo so much disinformation? Well, you have to have truth squads at work 24 hours a day every day. And we don't have them."

[Livyjr]

Yes but the elements I wanted to emphasize were:

1. CP: Has the media played a role in transforming citizens into spectators of this process?

Vidal: Well, they have been transformed, by design, by corporate America, aided by the media, which belongs to corporate America.

They are no longer citizens.

They are hardly voters.

They are consumers, and they consume those things which are advertised on television.

And:

2. CP: You wrote at the end of a 2002 essay that so-called inalienable rights, once alienated, are often lost forever.

Can you describe what's changed about America during the Bush years that represent permanent, or at least long-term, legacies that will survive Bush?

Vidal: Well, the Congress has ceded--which it cannot do--but it has ceded its power to declare war.

That is written in the Constitution.

It's the most important thing in the Constitution, ultimately.

And having ceded that to the Executive Branch, he can declare war whenever he finds terrorism.

Now, terrorism is a wonderful invention because it doesn't mean anything.

It's an abstract noun.

You can't have a war against an abstract noun; it's like having a war against dandruff.

It's meaningless.

But you can terrify people.

The art of government now, the art of control as practiced by the current junta, is:

Keep the people frightened.

It's exactly what Adolf Hitler and his gang did.

Keep everybody frightened, tell them lies--and the bigger the lie, the more they'll believe it.

There's nothing the average American now believes (because he's been told it 10,000 times a day) that is true.

Now how do you undo so much disinformation?

Well, you have to have truth squads at work 24 hours a day every day.

And we don't have them.

Well, there is us, jeffmoskin, and maybe that is where it has to start!

BUT .....

UP HERE, in the corrupt EMPIRE STATE, with its now judicially-approved PSYCHIATRIC TAKE-DOWNS and state-sponsored GULAGS for those who would serve as "TRUTH SQUADS", maybe it has already ended, and so ......

PEOPLE UP HERE ARE DEFINITELY FRIGHTENED, BY THAT!

AND ...

That is by design!

AND WITH INTENT!

TO CRUSH DISSENT!

SO!

That leaves you, jeffmoskin, and the KAH-lee-FAH-neeans, as OUR only remaining hope!

SO!

Keep those temples covered, jeffmoskin!

And if you hear a rapid CRAAACKwhiiine, that means they are aiming at you, but just missed ....

With that shot, anyway!

SO!

DUCK, jeffmoskin, for we need you around for yet another day!

[Livyjr]

And here is a very important message FOR ALL AMERICANS to read and heed, from Senator John Kerry!

If you can, please give him and this VITAL CAUSE for OUR REPUBLIC, and OUR DEMOCRACY, all the support that you can!

AND ...

Thank you from a grateful nation, or one of its citizens, anyway!

Dear Livyjr,

Last week, thanks to you, Republicans in Congress heard first hand how Americans will not stand by quietly and let their voices be silenced.

Tomorrow morning, we will take the next step, when a vitally important johnkerry.com ad appears in USA Today.

I will send a copy to every one of my Republican colleagues in the Senate.

When I do, I want to tell them that the number of people standing behind the ad's powerful message now stands at over 200,000.

Help us get there.

See the ad - and count yourself among those personally supporting its message.

http://www.johnkerry.com/usatoday

Tens of thousands of you have already called your Republican Senators opposing GOP leaders' efforts to invoke the so-called "nuclear option" on the confirmation of federal judges.

We are acting in response to a disturbing pattern in which a handful of Republican leaders seek the ability to do whatever they want, whenever they want, without regard to principle.

We have to act because America can't afford to go where they're trying to take us.

http://www.johnkerry.com/usatoday

The Republican drive to silence your voice in Washington is in high gear.

House Leader Tom DeLay has led a no-holds-barred drive to silence all opposing voices in the Congress.

He also engineered a highly partisan effort to force the redrawing of congressional districts in Texas - funded by heavy-handed tactics that led to the indictment of three close DeLay associates.

And last week, DeLay issued an ominous threat that federal judges (appointed by both Democrats and Republicans) who dared to defy his wishes in the Terry Schiavo case will have to "answer for their behavior."

Making President Bush's judicial nominations immune to a Senate filibuster is the next step in the GOP's out-of-control grab for power.

If Senator Frist, the Senate Majority Leader, can convince enough Republican Senators to go along, the nomination and confirmation of judges will become a tightly-controlled, one-party affair.

We're calling on Republican Senators to persuade their party's leaders not to pursue this reckless course.

If you haven't done so already, please contact your Republican Senator's office.

Politely let him or her know that, as a constituent, you are deeply opposed to Senator Frist's "nuclear option" plan.

Then take another step.

Add your name to the list of those personally supporting our call for an end to the wide-ranging Republican assault on constitutional principles.

Thanks for helping with this vital and time-sensitive effort.

Sincerely,

John Kerry

P.S. When I send our USA Today ad to my Republican colleagues tomorrow morning, I want to tell them that its message has been personally backed by over 200,000 people.

You can help us reach that goal.

Please sign now - and, after you do, please forward this e-mail to your friends, neighbors, and family.

[Livyjr]

And when did my ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS and subsequent activism on behalf of the environment and public health really begin?

Whoever really knows, but maybe here would be a good place to start:

"Radioactive rain sheds light on value of science - Infamous day for Capital Region give students new appreciation of chemistry"

By RICK KARLIN, Staff writer, Albany, New York Times Union
First published: Sunday, April 3, 2005

CAMBRIDGE -- Chemistry isn't ordinarily a hot topic, but Judy Gerardi is making it so.

For Regents chemistry, the Cambridge Senior High School teacher had her kids read a "A Good Day Has No Rain."

Written by former Times Union reporter Bill Heller, the book documents a little-known 1953 incident when nuclear fallout blanketed the Capital Region, thanks to a freakishly heavy thunderstorm that brought down a massive radioactive cloud the jet stream had carried east from an atom bomb test in the Nevada desert.

At the time, local scientists measured a spike in radioactivity levels across the greater Capital Region, which Gerardi used as a jumping off point for a segment on nuclear chemistry.

While high school students frequently ask why courses like chemistry, or math, or physics are relevant, there were no such questions last month after they met with Heller.

Following a freewheeling hour-long discussion, the approximately 75 students from Gerardi's chemistry class and Steve Butz's AP environmental science class were painfully aware of the relevance.

A few went away wondering if their parents, neighbors or loved ones may have gotten cancer from the fallout.

"It shows how chemistry does effect you," said Brittany Griffin, 16, one of Gerardi's students.

"It just kind of scares me," added classmate Ellen Kapitan, also 16.

Like many students in the Cambridge area, Kapitan has relatives who live on dairy farms, and knows how quickly milk can travel from the cow to your local supermarket.

Following the fallout, there was concern that kids may have been exposed to thyroid-damaging radioactive iodine that landed on grazing fields and was consumed by milking cows (there's no longer any danger from that; unlike other radioactive isotopes, iodine quickly fades from the environment).

Learning about iodine, as well as cesium or strontium, was part of the book assignment, said Gerardi, who noted that the Regents chemistry exams now include questions relating to current events.

Along with questions about neutrons and electrons, valences, and moles, recent exams have had questions about Yucca Mountain, which is designated as a nuclear waste site.

Butz agreed, noting that the AP tests typically have segments on Chernobyl as well as the role of weather patterns in creation of acid rain.

"Living in New York and facing those issues, it's really relevant," said Butz.

end quotes

It's relevant, alright, most especially when you are living in a county in the Capital District with a corrupt County health Department!

[Livyjr]

Dear Livyjr,

We are acting in response to a disturbing pattern in which a handful of Republican leaders seek the ability to do whatever they want, whenever they want, without regard to principle.

We have to act because America can't afford to go where they're trying to take us.

http://www.johnkerry.com/usatoday

The Republican drive to silence your voice in Washington is in high gear.

House Leader Tom DeLay has led a no-holds-barred drive to silence all opposing voices in the Congress.

He also engineered a highly partisan effort to force the redrawing of congressional districts in Texas - funded by heavy-handed tactics that led to the indictment of three close DeLay associates.

And last week, DeLay issued an ominous threat that federal judges (appointed by both Democrats and Republicans) who dared to defy his wishes in the Terry Schiavo case will have to "answer for their behavior."

Making President Bush's judicial nominations immune to a Senate filibuster is the next step in the GOP's out-of-control grab for power.

If Senator Frist, the Senate Majority Leader, can convince enough Republican Senators to go along, the nomination and confirmation of judges will become a tightly-controlled, one-party affair.

We're calling on Republican Senators to persuade their party's leaders not to pursue this reckless course.

Sincerely,

John Kerry

And speaking of "coincidence", or is it "synchronicity"?

Top Stories - The Christian Science Monitor

"Judicial aftershocks from the Schiavo case"

Mon Apr 4, 4:00 AM ET

Perceptions of how the courts handled the case could have ramifications for Bush's judicial nominees.

By Warren Richey, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON - In the end, as Terri Schiavo clung to life in her Florida hospice after nearly two weeks without food or water, 12 years of legal battles came down to one final appeal.

In a 15-page emergency brief, lawyers asked the US Supreme Court to vindicate Ms. Schiavo's constitutional right to life.

The high court's answer came Wednesday around 11 p.m.

Application denied.

Ten hours later, Schiavo passed away.

In the emotional moments after the announcement, pro-life and disability-rights supporters lashed out at a judicial system that they said was being run by activist judges who favor death over life.

House majority leader Tom DeLay went one step further.

"The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior," he said Thursday.

He called upon the Judiciary Committee to launch an investigation of what he says is "an arrogant, out-of-control, unaccountable judiciary that thumbed their nose at Congress and the president."

But was the Schiavo case influenced by so-called "activist" judges who allowed their ideological convictions and policy preferences to overshadow the law and influence the outcome of the case?

Legal analysts are divided on the issue.

Perceptions of how the Schiavo case was handled are important - for one, because they could play a key role in looming battles in the US Senate over President Bush's judicial nominees, and a potential Supreme Court vacancy.

Those battles may begin as early as this week, with the conservative camp somewhat split over the propriety of congressional intervention in the Schiavo case.

Religious conservatives are angry and primed for a fight.

But many other conservatives were alarmed at what they saw as federal intervention into a private family matter that has historically been entrusted to state courts and state judges.

Many legal analysts say that for the most part, judges performed their duties as neutral, dispassionate arbiters of the law.

"An enormous spotlight and an enormous amount of pressure have been placed upon the judiciary, and yet they have behaved in a lawlike fashion," says Charles Baron, a Boston College law professor and expert in right-to-die issues.

"These judges, if you look at their record, are not people who have records as being right-to-diers or left-wing activist judges."

"These are people who wrote opinions that track the law."

But others say that some judges appear to have avoided confronting serious, substantive legal issues by relying on formalistic devotion to legal process.

"The judiciary, both state and federal, have failed miserably in the Schiavo case," says Virginia Armstrong, national chairman of the Eagle Forum's Court Watch.

"It is one of the poorest performances we have ever seen in American justice."

Supporters of the judiciary's performance in the Schiavo case note the large number of state and federal judges involved.

They say familiar conservative-liberal distinctions do not seem to have played a major role in the outcome, particularly at the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals, where seven of the 12 judges were appointed by Republican presidents.

"It is not like the judges appointed by one kind of president are voting one way and judges appointed by a different kind of president are voting a different way," says Vikram Amar, a constitutional law professor at San Francisco's Hastings College of the Law.

Perhaps the biggest irony of the case was the extent to which conservative, pro-life lawyers acting on behalf of Schiavo's parents sought to persuade federal judges and justices to embrace an expansive constitutional right to life that would mandate affirmative steps to protect Schiavo's life.

According to some analysts, it would have necessitated the same kind of liberal reading of the Constitution that upheld a right to abortion in Roe v. Wade - a constitutional holding denounced by conservatives as the epitome of judicial activism.

In a 1990 right-to-die case, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote for the five-justice majority:

"It cannot be disputed that the Due Process Clause [of the Constitution's 14th Amendment] protects an interest in life as well as an interest in refusing life-sustaining medical treatment."

But while the high court has established a constitutional right to refuse medical treatment and a right to abortion, it has never spelled out the contours of a constitutional right to life.

The Schiavo case was seen by some as a possible battleground to do just that, perhaps to the detriment of abortion rights.

But the courts refused to get involved.

"What is driving this case is not the constitutionality of the federal [Schiavo] statute, or the intrusion on federalism," says John Eastman, a constitutional law professor at Chapman University School of Law in Orange, Calif.

"The underlying connection with abortion is driving this."

But Professor Eastman says a pro-life ruling in the federal courts would not amount to a conservative version of judicial activism.

Rather, he says a right-to-die, pro-abortion approach to constitutional law has inverted the principles of the Founding Fathers.

"It turns what is supposed to be a government devoted to protecting rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness [into a government that enforces] a court-crafted right to die," he says.

But even if the courts declined to read a broad, substantive right to life into the Constitution, some legal analysts say the Schiavo case was strong enough to justify more judicial review than was received.

One issue: whether the Florida court acted in violation of federal due process rights.

Florida law requires that Schiavo's wish to have her feeding tube disconnected be proved by "clear and convincing" evidence.

Lawyers for Schiavo's parents argued that hearsay testimony of husband Michael Schiavo and others about statements that they say Ms. Schiavo made in the late 1980s does not rise to the evidentiary level necessary to pass constitutional muster.

They also argued that a federal judge in Tampa had a sworn duty under the new federal law passed by Congress to conduct a new and full trial to examine for himself whether the evidence was clear and convincing.

Instead, US District Judge James Whittemore framed the entire federal case as an application for a temporary restraining order to reinsert the feeding tube.

He declined to order the tube reinserted after ruling that lawyers for Schiavo's parents had failed to raise any substantial claims.

Some analysts say that in bypassing the letter of the Schiavo law, Judge Whittemore's judicial inaction became a form of judicial activism.

"What we usually hear of judicial activism is a judge finding some right in the Constitution that isn't there."

"In this case, it was a statute that clearly was there but was being ignored," says Wendy Long, a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, which supports Mr. Bush's judicial nominees.

"The court, in a sense, was making a policy decision that it didn't want to look at the issue that Congress and the president wanted it to look at."

Others praise Whittemore's approach.

"If one was looking for a model of a district court judge to have been given this assignment, I think we found one," says Douglas Kmiec, a constitutional law professor at Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu, Calif.

"He understood that it was both an emotionally charged issue but also one that arose in the context of a preexisting constitutional structure and a preexisting body of law."

[Abu Beacon]

[quote=jeffmoskin,Apr 4 2005, 03:57 AM]
Gore Vidal was interviewed by City Pages:
The Undoing of America

Gore Vidal on war for oil, politics-free elections, and the late, great U.S. Constitution.

by Steve Perry

jeffmoskin ----- The Gore Vidal article is outstanding.

I sent it to a few others not connected with this thread.

It has been a long time since I have seen anything written by Gore Vidal.

Probably, I haven't been looking in the right places.

Good, good article.

A.B.

[jeffmoskin]

[quote=Abu Beacon,Apr 4 2005, 05:11 PM]
[quote=jeffmoskin,Apr 4 2005, 03:57 AM]
Gore Vidal was interviewed by City Pages:
The Undoing of America

Gore Vidal on war for oil, politics-free elections, and the late, great U.S. Constitution.

by Steve Perry

jeffmoskin ----- The Gore Vidal article is outstanding.

I sent it to a few others not connected with this thread.

It has been a long time since I have seen anything written by Gore Vidal.

Probably, I haven't been looking in the right places.

Good, good article.

A.B.

[/quote]

Glad you feel that way, too, Mr. A.B. I found a lot of truth in it. More truth than I really wanted to hear, in fact, but the truth has a way of biting you later if you ignore it now.

[Livyjr]

Glad you feel that way, too, Mr. A.B.

I found a lot of truth in it.

More truth than I really wanted to hear, in fact, but the truth has a way of biting you later if you ignore it now.

The truth is biting us right in the ***, now, and the teeth have only just begun to lightly touch the tender flesh, is how I see it, jeffmoskin!

We are in the day and age of the acquisitors and the ignorant, which is really one of the "phases" on the "birth to death" cycle of civilizations, in fact the last one, before civilizations historically fall!

It is a lot like what happens when a swarm of locusts goes through an area, and destroys all in their path!

Survival itself becomes difficult in their wake!

And when the locusts are swarming, all one can really do at the point is not be a stalk of grain, and hope for a flock of seagulls or some other kind of locust -eating bird to come, and barring that ........

Oh, well!

[Livyjr]

And keeping with our habit of looking all around ourselves here, to determine on a minute-by-minute and day-by-day basis what life in OUR America is really all about, let's go to the American CLIENT/PUPPET STATE of Iraq, first, to see how things fare over there, for us, and for ours:

Middle East - AP

"Four GIs Killed in Attacks Across Iraq"

1 hour, 1 minute ago

By ANTONIO CASTANEDA, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Four U.S. troops were killed in clashes and bombings across Iraq, the U.S. military said Tuesday, and videos posted on the Internet showed militants purportedly beheading an Iraqi soldier and killing a reported informer.

A joint U.S.-Iraqi attack on dozens of insurgents in eastern Diyala province on Monday left two American soldiers and one Iraqi soldier dead, U.S. military spokesman said.

Two U.S. soldiers were also wounded in the attack, which continued into Tuesday.

In Baghdad's southern Dora neighborhood, an abandoned taxi exploded on an expressway near a U.S. patrol on Tuesday, killing another U.S. soldier and wounding four others, said Sgt. 1st Class David Abrams, a spokesman for Task Force Baghdad.

Another explosion targeted a joint Iraqi-U.S. convoy in Baghdad's Amiriyah neighborhood, said al-Amil police captain Talib Thamir.

Abrams said a blast occurred but he did not have any details.

A U.S. Marine was also killed Monday by an explosion in the sprawling, western province of Anbar.

At least 1,537 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Meanwhile, gunmen broke into a house and kidnapped a top Interior Ministry official, Brig. Gen. Jala Mohammed Saleh, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

Saleh is involved in anti-insurgency operations in Iraq, but it was unclear why he was abducted.

Kidnappings are common, with some abductors seeking ransoms and others making political demands.

Babil police spokesman Capt. Muthana Khalid said 10 headless bodies were found by Iraqi police 30 miles south of Baghdad, but he didn't give any details on exactly where or how the bodies were located.

Seven of the victims were identified as Iraqi soldiers, and three others were police, according to Khalid and an Interior Ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

There have been several reports of the discovery of headless corpses, usually believed to be Iraqi security forces, but none have been independently confirmed.

In a purported video posted Tuesday from Al-Qaida in Iraq, a text shown in the images identified the Iraqi soldier as Jassim Mohammed Hussein Mahdi, who appeared to be in his early 20s.

The video also showed the black banner of the group, which is headed by wanted Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The video, posted on a militant Web site that carries most al-Qaida in Iraq statements, could not be immediately authenticated.

It showed an unidentified interrogator talking to the man, who said he had received orders from his superiors "to kill the mujahedeen anywhere and without hesitation."

The man was shown squatting on the ground in an empty room, wearing full military gear with his hands tied behind his back.

He said he was a member of the Iraqi National Guard's 4th Brigade, but did not say when or where he had been captured by militants.

Mahdi said he "regretted" working with the U.S.-allied Iraqi government and urged "all members of the police, National Guard and army to abandon this work, which is religiously prohibited."

"God's verdict against this renegade, who was tempted by dollars, has been carried out," said a statement shown on the video.

The video later showed Mahdi lying blindfolded on the ground before two masked men appeared.

One held Mahdi's legs while the other severed his head with a knife with shouts of "God is great!" heard from the background.

Al-Qaida in Iraq has claimed responsibility for beheading Western hostages and many members of the Iraqi security forces.

A second video posted on the same Web site by another group, Ansar al-Sunnah Army, showed a man who confessed to a militant interrogating him that he worked as an informer to the police in the northern city of Mosul.

The militant was speaking in the distinct Mosul accent of Iraqi Arabic.

The man, who identified himself as Hussein Taha Qassim and said he was born in 1968, told the interrogator that he informed the police about the hideouts of four "mujahedeen."

He said the police killed three of them and the fourth escaped.

In the next image, Qassim was shown lying face-down on the ground, and a masked gunman shot him with a volley of bullets from an automatic weapon.

The video's authenticity could not be verified.

In a day of stepped-up attacks, insurgents also targeted government and religious officials.

In Hillah, a member of the Babil provincial council, Salim Hilal, was gunned down en route to work, and two suspects were arrested, police spokesman Capt. Muthana Khalid said.

A Sunni cleric, Hilal Karim, was killed in a drive-by shooting as he was entering his mosque in the New Baghdad neighborhood of the capital, police Col. Ahmed Aboud said.

Karim served as the assistant to the mosque's imam.

In the northern city of Mosul, insurgents killed a Kurdistan Democratic Party official, Salim Ibrahim, according to KDP official Abdul-Ghani Botani.

In the central city of Baqouba, gunmen wounded a government translator and killed her father in a drive-by shooting, said Brig. Gen. Adil Molan of the Diyala provincial police department.

One policeman was killed and two others were injured when a roadside bomb hit their car in the southern city of Basra, police Col. Karim al-Zeidi said.

In London, a British parliamentary committee issued a report Tuesday saying excessive use of force by U.S. troops had antagonized Iraqis and made the process of rebuilding the country more difficult.

The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, which scrutinizes Britain's foreign policy, also suggested that Iraq had replaced Afghanistan as a training ground for international terrorists.

[Livyjr]

Middle East - AP

"Four GIs Killed in Attacks Across Iraq"

By ANTONIO CASTANEDA, Associated Press Writer

In London, a British parliamentary committee issued a report Tuesday saying excessive use of force by U.S. troops had antagonized Iraqis and made the process of rebuilding the country more difficult.

The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, which scrutinizes Britain's foreign policy, also suggested that Iraq had replaced Afghanistan as a training ground for international terrorists.

Now, if I were a BBC "newsreader" coming across these above two statements, and especially the first one, or if I were a Peter Jennings, or one of those on FAUX NEWS who read the news, I would stop and say, "WHO IN THE HELL IS SURPRISED BY THIS?"

"AND THIS IS NOT NEWS!"

"THIS IS THE PLAN, THE DESIGN!"

Of course excessive force has been used, and of course that has made things more difficult!

THAT IS WHERE THE MONEY IS!

You think these security firms want to KILL THEIR GOLDEN GOOSE, and turn off the spigot from OUR treasury INTO THEIR POCKETS while there is still some money left in the treasury?

GET REAL, here, folks, GET REAL!

George W. Bush IS NOT the president of those who would have peace!

There's no ******* money in peace!

George W. Bush is the president FOR those who would have a lot of money in THEIR POCKETS in a never-ending supply, caused by never-ending turmoil and chaos in OUR world!

SO?

What's the issue with this use of excessive force that has made things more dificult in Iraq?

What am I missing?

I actually thought things were right on schedule, myself, with the continuing violence occurring over there in the CLIENT/PUPPET state, at least with respect to financial reports from the CACI's and others of that ilk!

And that certainly is not any kind of news at all!

IT IS REALITY!

PEACE, folks, just does not pay the bills, bullets do!

SO!

Get used to it!

And that is not news, either!

Just some more reality come here to bite us all, right on the ***!