So we’ve reached the 10th anniversary of President George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” spectacle, the nadir of any U.S. presidency since the time Richard Nixon made his getaway in a helicopter from the White House lawn. The aircraft carrier stunt was a Karl Rove P.R. production designed to provide images for Bush’s 2004 re-election...
Apologists for the war of aggression against Iraq that President George W. Bush launched ten years ago claim the United Nations and various European nations’ intelligence services “believed” Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction.” We constantly hear from former Bush officials that “everybody got it wrong” on Iraq when it came to whether or...
As sure as the sun rises in the East we can count on seeing a host of North America’s most prominent “conservatives” and right-wingers hyperventilate in the days ahead about what a horrible “friend of Castro” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was. There will be obituaries that refer to Chavez as a “communist” or a...
It’s a welcome step to see President Obama appoint two Vietnam veterans to serve as Secretaries of State and Defense. John Kerry and Chuck Hagel are two people who have experienced war directly and have voiced publicly their deep ambivalence about war. Too bad in 2002 neither of them were willing to risk their...
Largely lost in the media din in the closing 48 hours of the debt ceiling “debate” was the fact that the Chamber of Commerce and Wall Street high rollers were urging their servants in Congress not to throw the nation into default because it was going to hurt their bottom lines. The last minute...
For many years now in California we’ve witnessed an extremist Republican minority in the legislature hold the state budget hostage through manipulating the “two-thirds rule” that allows a legislative minority to dictate to the majority whether any new revenues can be raised. The debt ceiling gambit that Republicans in the House of Representatives have...
D-Day For Public Employees
What we are witnessing right now in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and other states is the final battle against the last bastion of union strength in this country. With the aggressive onslaught aimed at public employees and their unions that Republican governors have unleashed in recent weeks, it’s long past time for politicians calling themselves...
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