The goateed face of Fred Thompson, Law and Order actor, one time senator, and failed presidential candidate doing tax-hating video bites to preserve the deficit bloating Bush tax cuts is the latest in a series of right-wing maneuvers to promote factional greed and ignorance. Video bites like Fred’s are a principal source of public information and no counter-bites have appeared.

Where is the immediate response strategy of the ’08 Obama Campaign? It may be beneath presidential dignity for Obama to return to the campaign trenches. So send a stand-in with equivalent or greater visibility to Fred Thompson’s to educate the country about who is and who isn’t going to pay more taxes if the Bush tax cuts are not extended. The faction bearing the income tax increase is Americans earning more than $250,000. Why shouldn’t they? “With taxes” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “we buy civilization.”

It is delusional to forget that an unscrupulous right-wing enemy has been waging a media war against democrats and progressives since Obama took the oath of office. It’s time to bite back.

The Gulf oil spill is not only a metaphor for the habitat-killing greed of Big Oil; it fits the society-killing greed of the hate taxes movement of the last thirty years. When I open my mail box this week it is packed with special election campaign flyers for the state senate race in California.

One is published by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. On the cover appear the words “Politician John Laird’s Tax Hikes Hurt All of Us.” Above the words is a close up of the frightened faces of a senior couple who look like they’ve just been told calamitous news. Inside is an image of a worried and fearful young couple in soft focus with their infant child in foreground. The flyer announces “You pay the price for Laird’s tax Hikes.” A list of income, sales, property, utility, and payroll tax bills candidate Laird apparently supported as an assemblyman are presented like the counts in a grand jury indictment. The flyer accuses Laird of taking money that YOU could use to pay living expenses, of imposing higher costs on YOU for clothes, a car, a home and making YOU pay higher utility bills. The message is clear: Taxing YOU is evil.

The flyer doesn’t say that not taxing YOU means governments have deficits that compel them to borrow from China, allows public infrastructure to disintegrate, causes American education to fail to produce a globally competitive workforce, cuts back on public safety services of police and fire departments, and induces budget crises. Instead the flyer appeals to an ideology of selfishness and the retentive greed of citizens.

When will citizens and politicians remember that simple words of the United States Constitution that give Congress the power to “Lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises to pay the Debts and provide FOR THE COMMON DEFENSE AND GENERAL WELFARE of the United States…?” The founding fathers have a message for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association: constitutional tax policy is designed to make the money that goes around come around.

President Obama's State of the Union description of the Cantor/McConnell Republican Faction of NO as "playing short term politics" and failing to display “leadership” was an understatement. The Faction of NO poses a profound threat to the United States. They, like their nineteenth century confederate counterparts, have seceded from constitutional government and declared a civil war. On Main Street that war is waged with racist hate speech spectacles. In the media it advances from the mouths of Limbaugh and Beck.

In the Senate of the United States the Faction of NO’s civil war is waged with Rule 22 that establishes the parliamentary procedure for stopping debate on bills including those to change Rule 22 itself. If sixteen Senators sign a motion to bring to a close the debate upon any measure, motion, or other matter pending before the Senate, the Presiding Officer, without debate, submits to the Senate for a yea-and-nay vote the question: “Is it the sense of the Senate that the debate shall be brought to a close?” If that question is decided in the affirmative by three-fifths of the Senators present or in the case of a motion to change Rule 22 by an affirmative vote of two-thirds of those present, then debate limitations are imposed. If not, the bill or motion can be filibustered to death.

In the Senate the Faction of NO has obstructed the appointment of Obama nominees. As of November 2009, 53 of Obama nominees are still waiting for a full Senate vote, and another 175 are pending in committee. Since 1949, “cloture votes” under Rule 22 have focused on only 24 nominees. In the first nine months of the Obama administration, however, there have been 5! In the Democrat-controlled 110th Congress, Republicans have filibustered more legislation and have required more “cloture votes” to break them than in any other Congress in history. (Rebecca Lehman 11/05/2009 http://www.ourfuture.org) No matter what party is in the majority, under Rule 22, the Senate’s functioning is subject to the risk of minority tyranny, because a super majority of 60 votes is required to perform its constitutional role.

So how can the country deal with the civil war by the Faction of NO in the United States Senate?

For starters we can resurrect the wisdom of Founding Father and Fourth President of the United States James Madison. Following the constitutional convention in Philadelphia, Madison, Jay and Hamilton published the Federalist Papers to promote ratification of the new Constitution. In Federalist Papers, No 10, Madison wrote, “By a faction I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” The causes of faction are ‘sown’ in the nature of man. They divide mankind in parties, “inflame them with mutual animosity, and (render) them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.” Madison argued, “the most common and durable source of factions is the unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principle task of modern legislation and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of government.” Madison concluded, “…the causes of faction cannot be removed and the relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.”

Now, more than two hundred years after Madison’s wrote those words we are faced with tyrannous minority waging civil war in the Senate of the United States. Madison tells us what to do by what he proposed and argued at the constitutional convention. There, his “Virginia Plan” was presented to the convention that contained the basic design of the future U.S. Government. It provided for a bicameral legislature, with both houses based on proportional representation…. (Chernow, Ron Alexander Hamilton, Penguin ,2004, page 230)

By switching the words “minority” and “majority” in Madison’s argument to the convention justifying proportional representation he speaks directly to us today. According to his biographer Ralph Ketchem, “Next, Madison presented to the convention for the first time the argument that since honesty, respect for character, and conscience had proven insufficient guards against faction and oppression of the majority, only the inclusion within a government of a multitude of interests, sentiments, and sections, each with the power to resist others, would prevent minority tyranny. History proved conclusively that “where a minority are united by a common sentiment, and have an opportunity, the rights of the majority party becomes insecure.” The only remedy, he concluded, “is to enlarge the sphere, and thereby divide the community into so great a number of interests and parties … that in case they should have such a (common) interest, they may not be apt to unite in the pursuit of it. It was incumbent on us then to try this remedy, and with that view to frame a republican system on such a scale and in such a form as will control all the evils which have been experienced.”

When the convention split on the question of proportional representation in the Senate, Delegate Roger Sherman proposed the “Great Compromise”: let representation in the lower house be according to the respective numbers of free inhabitants, and in the upper house let the states be equal. (Ketcham, Ralph James Madison, University of Virginia Press, 1991, page 203).

As result of the “Great Compromise,” Article 1, Section 3, Clause 1 of the Constitution provided that the legislatures of each state shall choose two Senators and with one vote each. By June 5, 1914 the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution changed Article 1, Section 3, to read: “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote…”

Today we can undo “the Great Compromise” and implement proportional representation in the Senate with a 28th Amendment to the Constitution that would provide: “The Senate of the United States shall be composed one Senator for each Federal Senatorial District containing 3.5 million persons of voting age in each State determined by the census and shall be elected by the people of each Senatorial District, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote.

I offer the number 3.5 million only for illustration purposes and to suggest that the proposed federal senatorial districts in each state should be substantially larger than congressional districts. A 28th Amendment would enlarge the membership of Senate to more accurately reflect the diverse factional and regional interests of the nation and would likely neutralize the power of the Faction of NO or any other minority that seeks to tyrannize the majority in the Senate of the United States.

Two very different events last week inspired me to do some theorizing about counter-terror. The first was the Panetta Institute presentation, “Can America Win the War on Terror?” The second was a presentation of The Hunger Project - a global, non-profit, strategic organization committed to the sustainable end of world hunger.

The Panetta Institute panel – General John Abizaid, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, and moderator Frank Sesno – spent some time debating whether the term “war” was the right word to describe what the United States has been doing since 9/11. Abizaid argued it was; Ignatius had his doubts. Neither of them said having an accurate description of U.S. counter terror offensives was important.

The “counterinsurgency war” label used to describe the U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan does not really fit offensives against al Qaeda, essentially a non-governmental terror organization (or NGTO) that moves from country to country. Al Qaeda is an occupier and effective offensives against it require a special kind collaboration among interveners like the United States, the governments, and the citizens of the countries that it occupies.

The primary targets of counter terror interventions should not be the current NGTO leaders. Rather, the targets should be the specific populations that might support them. The mission should be to change the economic, health, infrastructural, educational, and political condition of target populations so they will deny support to NGTO’s like al Qaeda.

How do you accomplish big missions like that?

Think small and long-term. After The Hunger Project Presentation I began to think in what I call “micro-contextual” terms. I began to think of multiple interventions at the grass roots level of villages, hamlets, districts, and towns inspired by the micro-contextual strategies for small communities like the local democracy, epicenter, and micro financing strategies of The Hunger Project. This organization consistently gets big empowerment pay offs in micro contexts for a small intervention price. The Hunger Project has reduced malnutrition, illiteracy, poverty, and disease by entrepreneurially, educationally, and politically empowering women in villages throughout India, Africa, and Latin America.

In India, a constitutional amendment requiring a fixed percentage of representation by women on village councils was a critical top-down reform. Once implemented, women were able to use their new political power to change themselves, their families, and their village communities. The modest intervention of the Hunger Project was to provide leadership training to equip these new village leaders to prudently exercise their judgment to allocate government resources.

In Africa, the Hunger Project’s epicenter strategy built community centers with all local labor to create gathering places for community action and links with government resources. The Hunger Project stimulated the formation of partnerships between small village populations and local governments that built the many epicenters that now provide teachers, health workers, literacy instructors, and agricultural extension workers - all of which support sustainable change at a micro-context level.

No doubt the leaders of the Hunger Project would insist that to be effective, interventions must be tailor made to fit each specific micro context whether in India, Africa, or Latin America. However, I think its strategy can be generalized: Stimulate sustainable micro context changes that empower people to self-improve their lives.

By revising that strategy somewhat you get a strategy for United States counter-terror interventions: Stimulate sustainable micro context changes that empower people to self-improve their lives to make them NGTO resistant.

How we can convince the Obama administration and other world leaders to implement micro-context strategies to counter terror? What about non-violent strategies that are rooted in the empowerment of women. What do you think?

With Palin’s folksy “There-you-go-again-Joe-looking-backward” line, McCain/Palin handlers launched their pitch to disengage the campaign from the Bush years. Don’t look back to the domestic and international wreckage Bush leaves. Don’t seek future solutions for the problems of financial collapse and global warming by examining how they occurred in the past and who is accountable. Ignore the past …and Bush. Just clean house, cut taxes, drill baby drill, and seek the city on the hill. Above all, forget the logic of cause and effect and the relationship between problem and solution.

This pitch is insulting to American voters including Joe Six-Pack. It is especially insulting to the intelligence of women. In an election year in which a woman, Hillary Clinton, was finally recognized for her equivalent or greater governing expertise, Palin’s debate presentation was a demeaning portrait.

A pitch that requires voters to dismiss intelligence, rationality, and above all, information and knowledge, is a disgrace. In these critical times we need leaders who are our best and our brightest.

When Speaker Pelosi stepped to the microphone in the House of Representatives before the vote on the first bailout bill and said, "the party is over," she announced a new brand politics that can deal with the Wall Street meltdown and the Iraq mess as well.

At the moment of her announcement, the United States faced the final collapse of Reaganomics and the wreckage of a thirty-year conservative frenzy to deregulate corporate enterprise. On its knees, Wall Street plead for a massive subsidy to bail out the corporate occupants of the credit and financial markets who had run amok and were too big to fail. Government had to perform resuscitation with 700 billion dollars to prevent the loss of credit availability for Main Street Americans.

Some in Congress asked the appropriate question: "What do the tax payers get for this revival infusion?" The answer others gave was the same answer that had been given in past bailouts: "Paybacks."

Paybacks can consist of the government becoming an equity partner in the dysfunctional enterprise and the beneficiary of its recovery in the market place. Government gets a "subsidization interest" for the capital it infused. If a collapsing company doesn't want the subsidy, fine. It can collapse. If it accepts the subsidy, government gets intramural influence to restructure, dispose of assets, and fire incompetent executives. The government also acquires an enforceable financial stake in the company's future.

Several steps are necessary before we can see how the payback approach can solve the Iraq mess. First, we must dismiss all the liberation, security, victory, battle-ground-of-the-war-on-terror talk of Bush and McCain as a colossal fraud covering an agenda to establish a puppet government to make deals with multinational oil companies. Second, we must cope with our national shame for having sacrificed the lives and wrecked the bodies and minds of young Americans for government-subsidized corporate imperialism in Iraq. Third, we must accept the reality of oil imperialism and inspect it for its problem solving opportunities.

The legal core of Iraq oil imperialism is the proposed Oil & Gas Law that would privatize oil exploitation and grant long term contracts to multinational oil companies. The financial terms of the Oil Law live in Chapter VII entitled "Fiscal Regime" that would obligate multinational oil companies to pay the taxes imposed by the Iraqi laws and a royalty in cash or in kind equal to 12.5% of the "Gross Production measured at the entry flange of the Main Pipeline." The multinationals get the net after payment of those taxes and the royalty.

A President of the United States seeking to end to the war of occupation could ask, "What subsidy payback opportunity does the proposed Oil Law offer American taxpayers and the people of Iraq?"

The possibilities include amending the "Fiscal Regime" to provide that two new entities will receive a significant cut of "Gross Production." One entity could be an Iraqi War Reconstruction Trust administered and distributed in the sole discretion of Iraqi trustees who represent Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish interests. Another entity could be a Subsidy Reimbursement Trust for the American Taxpayers whose cut would payback the billions Americans have spent for the imperial enterprise to date.

The long term Iraqi oil exploitation contracts could be made periodically renewable depending on the multinationals' compliance with their payment obligations to all parties to the contracts. If the companies don't want to take the amended deal, fine. Some other multinational will.

Hopefully American and Iraqi leaders will activate their problem solving creativity and consider the potentials of payback politics to bring at least some economic justice to their countries.

On Wednesday, as I listened to President Bush’s bail out offer-you-can’t-refuse speech laced with heavy doses of fear and panic, I was reminded of another Great Depression parallel: Hitler’s political exploitation of the Reichstag fire in 1934. Historian Anthony Read in his recent work, The Devil’s Disciples, reminds us how the Nazis hit the press to justify granting Hitler emergency powers.

Goring justified it with a lurid press statement, claiming – without producing a shred of evidence – to have proof that the ‘burning of the Reichstag was to be the signal for a bloody insurrection… and also the beginning of a general civil war.’

Hitler sought and received the issuance of an emergency decree approved unanimously by the Cabinet, and signed without demur by German President Hindenburg.

The ‘Decree for the Protection of People and State to Guard Against Communist Acts of Violence Endangering the State’ was the death warrant of democracy, and the charter for the coming Third Reich and all its iniquities. It was short and simple. Its first article removed at a stroke all the fundamental human rights enshrined in the Weimar constitution, specifically listing personal liberty, freedom of expression (including freedom of the press), rights of association and assembly, privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communication, the need for warrants for house searches, and confiscation of property.

After listening to Bush, I followed up on my intuition about the German parallel. As I read Anthony Read’s account quoted above I was horrified. If we say that the Reichstag Maneuver is the extortion of dictatorial executive power though threats, fear, and panic, the Bush presidency is defined by its use. His first application was the cram down of the Patriot Act; the second, the Iraq invasion to prevent a mushroom cloud over America. Then the threat of terror warranted the suspension of the treaties against torture and the constitutional prohibition of warrantless wire tapping. Now Bush’s prediction of collapse of the American economy is being used to shake down the American taxpayers for $700 billion by Monday to restore the free market status quo on Wall Street.

However, on Thursday conservative Republicans counter-maneuvered Bush. They are distancing themselves from their President who has "gone socialist" with the Paulson Plan that Obama favors if significant modifications are put in place to protect Americans. Conservatives are putting a game of Reichstag chicken in play. The only way conservatives will do the necessary bailout is to package it with government hating tax cuts and administration by a non-governmental entity. That way, the Reagan free market ideology that caused the Crash of '08 can remain alive and well and nobody can use the "s" word to describe Republicans who vote for a bailout.

If McCain stands with the conservatives, all this Reichstag maneuvering will have the effect of clarifying the alternatives presented to voters in this presidential election. It will be a choice between anti-regulatory free marketers who encourage Wall Street greed and advocates of a rational regulatory government that serves the interests of Americans and the health of capitalism. McCain will be standing target for Obama.

If McCain does not stand with the conservatives, he will remain a Bush echo who accepts Obama-type modifications to the bailout plan and alienates conservative Republicans.

The Crash of '08 forces Americans to watch history repeat itself. In 1929 unregulated Wall Street greed brought down our economy. In the '30's our leaders had the regulatory intelligence to enact the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 that separated investment banks that game the market from commercial banks that take in money and lend it to Americans. That was a simple but profound regulatory step. Other steps included securities regulations that required investment banks and stock promoters to disclose the risks of stock purchases so that buyers could make informed investment decisions. These regulations remained in effect through the seventies.

Ronald Reagan's presidency ushered in a new period in which New Deal era securities regulations were dismantled or put to sleep in the service of an ideology that government is bad and the only reliable regulatory force in American society is the market. That ideology licensed the free play of Wall Street greed and the wrecking of the regulatory state that contributed to the Crash of ’08.

So far the only crash remediation that has come from the Bush Administration is a dictatorial Government/Wall Street partnership that has the stench of fascism. Neither Bush nor Paulson have proposed intramural reforms to cut executive salaries or impose transparency on Wall Streeters in exchange for government welfare. Rather, they contend such reforms will hurt the recovery. Paulson’s only objective is liquefying “toxic” or “unmarketable securities” to restore the ability of banks to lend money. The Glass-Steagall repeal of the mandatory separation of investment and commercial banks makes lending by the commercial bank side of Wall Street giants depend on the ability of the investment banking side to liquefy securities for cash. Accordingly, the 700 billion bailout will only fund government purchases of “toxic securities.” Paulson doesn’t know how much the toxic securities are worth. He doesn’t know which of those securities are infected with the subprime virus. He has no idea which loans in the mortgage backed securities to be sold to Uncle Sam have gone through foreclosure, so there is no real estate securing them. According to Paulson that really doesn’t matter because liquidation is the only objective and the way to liquidate is a “market mechanism” like a “reverse auction.” The investment banks wanting to dump their toxics will “bid” a price for Uncle Sam to take them off their books. If there are no other bidders, that’s the buy price unless Uncle Sam can bid lower. The buyers and sellers in the reverse auction will be Wall Street bankers. Paulson assures us that we should not worry about conflicts of interest.

Paulson did say our existing regulatory model does not fit the contemporary financial environment. That is probably true. This is an era of linked transactions. Today's home loan is packaged into a Wall Street creation called a "collateralized debt obligation" that is resold on global markets to banks, insurance companies, and investors. In turn those COD's become the focus of a Credit Default Swap to protect the COD investors. When unqualified sub-prime borrowers failed to pay, the linked set of transactions collapsed in the Crash of '08. Paulson and Bush are not giving us an outline of a plan to prevent that in the future. All of the 700 billion will be spent to restore the unregulated pre-crash Wall Street free market system; regulation, if any, is up to the next president. There is absolutely no talk from Bush and Paulson about a long term regulation plan.

This is unacceptable. There should be no government funded liquidations without new government regulation. Congress must develop at least a concept of a regulation plan before agreeing to a 700 billion blind liquidation to restore the pre-crash status quo.

Barack Obama said the September 15th Crash shows the market-fixes-all theory of McCain and the conservatives is wrong. He is probably right. So what is his theory? Voters need to know. If the market can't fix it, what will? What is he offering to fix what promises to be the continuing collapse of financial and insurance markets?

We must look back at the regulatory intelligence of the New Deal securities and banking regulations that moderated the free market greed and short sighted stupidity of Wall Street. Back then, the New Deal regulatory effort was ad hoc and experimental. But it did explore a new role for the American government as the economic context manager. I see the same role for government today. Unwittingly, Bush sees it too. The Bear Stearns, Fanny/Freddie bailouts, even the Katrina recovery incompetence put government squarely in that role.

Given the Democrats New Deal roots why not affirm the context manager role of government as Obama's vision? It would put health care, job creation, immigration and a national mobilization for alternative energy development into a coherent whole that voters could understand. Democrats need to present the American people with a positive vision of government as an enlightened context manager ---not the demon to be wrecked as Republicans have advocated for since Reagan.

Barack Obama, please replace the market-fixes-all theory of the McCain conservatives with a simple easy to understand vision of the government you want to lead. If you do, the electorate could more easily buy into proposals for restoring a regulated balance to financial markets.

We know that Palin's acceptance speech was carefully crafted and well rehearsed. For that reason it is appropriate to examine the self-description she presented with the question: "What's the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom? (pause) Lipstick (another pause for laugher)."

Considered in context, there is something "un-straight" about the sequential presentation of Palin as the lipsticked pit bull, and McCain's self-representation as the Bush-distancing, end the rancor, reach across the aisle bipartisan.

These dissonant representations may be a matter of necessity because McCain is trying to play to two irreconcilable factions in American politics: right wing fundamentalist ideologues and pragmatic independents. By trying to play to both, he loses credibility, because his campaign lapses into Orwellian double think.

At the end of the Republican convention, the comments of Howard Fineman of MSNBC suggest that Palin is going back to Alaska for a week-long crash course to clothe her fundamentalist mentality in moderate dress. But the clear and convincing evidence of that mentality so toxically displayed on Wednesday night will impeach any McCainian make over.

Her canine self-description and McCain's choice of her as a running mate, confirm their continuing commitment to the Bush neoconservative assumption that international relations and domestic politics are mano-a-mano dog fights to the death.

No change here; just more of the same ideological tyranny.

I am grateful that John McCain's pick of Sarah Palin has put her experience front and center in the campaign debate. After all, there has been a lot talk about experience. We've heard:

"McCain has the experience to lead."

"Palin has more executive experience than Obama!"

"McCain has more foreign policy experience than Obama."

"Has McCain lost his 'no experience' argument by selecting Palin?"

Maybe experience is very important. What the Sarah Palin VP selection and her relevant experience strongly suggests is that a McCain/Palin administration will bring us four more years of impulsive and ideological decision making.

From the little we know about Palin, we can infer that once upon a time she had a life transforming religious experience that brought her to the fundamentalist belief in creationism. Apparently she has decided that the Genesis I story about the work of an all powerful God is a better "science" than the theory of evolution. If asked, like every other fundamentalist I know (and unlike any scientist I know), Palin will refuse to accept any evidence that her belief in Genesis 1 is false. From this, it is reasonable to say that the United States is again at risk that presidential decisional thinking about war, diplomacy, and human rights will be guided by ideas that are immune to contradictory evidence.

In this respect Palin is like George W. Bush, who according to Seymour Hersh believed his conduct of the war on terror was a divine calling. In the face of mounting evidence of failure in Iraq the President had only a broken record response: "Stay the course." Hersh reports the observations of a former defense official who said of the President, "He doesn't feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage 'People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.'"

On October 17, 2004, Ron Suskind in a New York Times Magazine article "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush", reported instances in which President Bush was guided by his "gut" and his Christian faith in presidential decision making.

But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, non-religious ways. The president demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aids and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision – often swiftly, based on creed or moral position – he expects complete faith in its rightness.

The June 2008 Rockefeller Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information of the Select Committee on Intelligence shows the Bush Administration's hyper-ideological commitment to invade Iraq and its refusal to consider evidence that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction.

Ron Suskind's recent book The Way of The World shows that the Bush Administration not only ignored evidence of the absence of WMD but also falsified evidence to support the Iraq invasion.

Before the invasion in March of 2003 the British had contacted the head of Iraqi intelligence Tahir Jalil Habbush and began to utilize him as a source of information about Iraq's weapons capabilities. British intelligence compiled a report using intelligence obtained from Habbush. The report stated that Saddam had ended his nuclear program in 1991, the same year he destroyed his chemical weapons stockpile. Iraq had no intention, Habbush said, of restarting either program.

The British delivered the Habbush report personally to CIA director George Tenet who briefed the President and Condi Rice. Thereafter, and well before the invasion, the White House buried the report and instructed the British that they were no longer interested in keeping the Habbush channel open. According to Suskind's CIA source: "Bush wanted to go to war in Iraq from the very first days he was in office. Nothing was going to stop that."

Suskind reports:

The White House …concocted a fake letter from Habush to Saddam, backdated it to July 1, 2001. It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President's Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link. The letter also mentioned suspicious shipments to Iraq from Niger set up with al Qaeda's assistance. The idea was to take the letter to Habbush and have him transcribe it in his own neat handwriting on a piece of Iraqi government stationary, to make it look legitimate. CIA would then take the finished product to Baghdad and have someone release it to the media.

On the basis of this reporting alone we can say that throughout his presidency Bush displayed an impulsive and hyper-ideological decision making mentality.

In the Sunday August 31, 2008 New York Times writers Elisabeth Bumiller and Michael Cooper report "McCain's history of making fast, instinctive and sometimes risky decisions." His selection of Palin was based on his judgment that Palin was a "kindred spirit."

Piecing together these items of journalistic evidence, McCain, Palin and Bush appear to be three of a kind from the standpoint of decision making mentality. If the Bush/McCain/Palin mentality is religious and hyper ideological, "experience" is irrelevant to their decision making.

Can we place our county in such hands for four more years?

Maybe the media felt the Rockefeller Report was old news. Everyone knows there were no weapons of mass destruction. The Bush Administration got it wrong. So they lied? So what? That's history. Now that we're in Iraq, its how we get out that is important.

Wrong! The Rockefeller Report is not old news. The public statements of Bush, Cheney, Powell, and Rumsfeld in the run up to the war about WMD and Saddam's links to al-Qaeda that the report focuses on display a cognitive pathology that continues to infect in the policy thinking of the Republican leadership. The pathology is disordered thinking that willfully refuses to consider evidence that falsifies a policy position. It resembles the stinking thinking of drug addicts.

You find it in the revival since 9/11 of trillion dollar defense spending on nuclear submarines, stealth air craft, star wars missile defense systems, and the like, in order to wage war against terrorists armed with box cutters and insurgents who strike and then dissolve back into Iraqi neighborhoods. Those spending decisions by the Bush Administration are made with complete disregard for the mountains of evidence that costly weapons systems designed to fight the Soviet Union no longer have utility in the current "war on terror." You find it in the AynRandian/Greenspandian mind set that ignores all evidence that regulation is good for a market economy as Bear Stearns crashes and burns. You find it in the Bush/McCain condemnation of the Supreme Court decision granting habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo prisoners as a threat to national security.

We need to recognize stinking policy thinking wherever it occurs and give it a strong dose of electoral therapy. Signs of this disorder, displayed in the Rockefeller Report, must be diagnosed for the impairment they reflect by citizens of an informed democracy. Unfortunately, the importance of this report was lost on the mainstream media in the weeks since its publication.

In the heads of men like John McCain and George Bush international relations are bi-polar. It's "us" and "them,” whether they are terrorists, aging communist societies, or Islamo-fascists. We'll never talk to “them” until they surrender to “us.” Until then, we'll keep on invading, killing, confining, blockading, and torturing. Until then, diplomacy is a dirty word.

Unfortunately for "us," international relations no longer fit the McCain/Bush bi-polar frame. The United States is only one player in a multi-player global context in which Uncle Sam no longer controls the show, the value of his currency, or the price of oil. The reality is the reverse. The price of oil determines the value of the dollar and the global petroleum reserves have probably peaked. China's demand for oil will soon equal and surpass the demand of the United States, driving down the value of the dollar even further. Russia, China, and Venezuela have taken state control of oil production and exportation giving them centralized power to assault the American dollar. OPEC and others could soon decide to peg the price of oil to EURO's rather than the dollar, thereby removing the international currency dominance of the United States. The collapse of the dollar may be accompanied by environmental collapse through global warming. To anyone who is conscious, international relations are not bi-polar, they are pluralistic and multi-lateral.

The only non-violent conflict management method we have devised to effectively deal with international multi-lateral conflict is diplomacy. Rather than employ it, McCain/Bush types call it Munich-style "appeasement" revealing their profound historical ignorance. As George Carlin would say, their bi-polar thinking is “bullshit and it's bad for ya.”

For as long as there have been editorial pages consumers of mainstream news media in the United States expect wit, humor and insight in political caricature. The opinion columns and letters to the editor that accompany political cartoons are often thoughtful and diverse in reasoning, ideology and perspective. For their part, editorial cartoonists illuminate the foibles of politicians, capture their hypocrisy, and satirize their policies with evocative and often stereotypical images. But the best cartoonists never lapse into hate. Hate caricatures stay on the street, if not in the gutter.

Things are real different in '08. Hillary Clinton's campaign for the Democratic nomination has brought hate cartoons to the lips of prime time anchors and talking heads. No wit, no humor, no insight from that source -- just debasing hate. Referring to Hillary they say "It cries." They diagnose her as having a “multiple personality" disorder. They argue she deserves to be "taken behind the barn." She's the "nagging wife" who barks bitchy demands to take out the garbage. According to Chris Mathews, Hillary is on her husband's "short leash." He adds that the only reason she won her Senate seat because her husband played around. The anchor boys even accuse her of "pimping out" her daughter Chelsea to win the nomination.

The prime time cartooning anchors and talking heads tell us nothing about Hillary - her achievements, her vision, her commitment rebuild the constitutional wreckage of the Bush years. They are silent about her uniquely feminine perspective displayed in concrete proposals for providing health care, stopping a preemptive war, restoring economic and fiscal justice, and ending energy dependence – all of which advance the public interest. These proposals, and the others she advocates, are based on the insight that we must be mindful that the choices we make as a society today will determine the character of our country tomorrow.

What the hate cartoons of the prime time anchors DO tell us is lot about the dark misogynist side of our society. It surfaces like an archetypal demon that configures women as empty stick figures, leashed animals, and rape objects that should be taken behind the barn. The arrival of hate cartoonists in mainstream news media is disgrace to the tradition of American journalism.

For more on this please see this post on the website Women's Voices for Change and watch the video.

No more checks come to the elderly couple from the local real estate investment company. Usually the monthly earnings from their investments in deeds of trust combine with their Social Security and their liquidating IRA to make ends meet. The investment company had told them their life savings were safe and secure in loans to real estate developers who build houses and commercial projects all over the state. No reason to worry.

When the couple complains to the company about the empty envelopes, the CEO says, "The environment changed on us. The developers we lent to can't sell their houses, because there no lenders to finance buyers. Sorry."

According to Kevin Phillips, in his latest book, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism one reason there are no lenders is that $500 billion dollars worth of securities called a "collateralized debt obligations" devised by Wall Street and exported all over the world are infected with bad subprime loans – loans that fee-seeking mortgage bankers and brokers made to borrowers who had no job, no income and no assets. The inevitable default and foreclosure of those loans continues to bring on huge international bank losses, a glut in a falling domestic housing market and the evaporation of lending capital. If loans cannot be sold in collateralized debt obligations and other factoring transactions, there are no new funds to lend. The subdivisions built with the savings of our elderly couple and thousands of others like them are unsellable.

"How could this happen?" asks the couple.

One answer may be that the fee-hungry arrangers of bad sub-prime real estate loans never stepped back to ask, "How could today's bad sub-prime loan destroy the real estate market tomorrow?

Would a loan arranger with a feminine perspective have stepped back and asked that question?

"Are you married or single?" asks the prospective employer of a young woman who is registered as a domestic partner with another woman. If she answers, "No, I am in a domestic partnership," she will disclose her sexual orientation, a matter of constitutionally protected privacy that is irrelevant to her job qualifications. If she declines to answer she may lose an employment opportunity.

On May 15, 2008 the California Supreme Court resolved the young woman's disclosure dilemma and those of all similarly situated same-sex domestic partners by establishing their right to answer, "Married."

The court' majority opinion written by Chief Justice George (In re MARRIAGE CASES Number S 147999) is a long discursive journey. It begins with the determination that the law of husband and wife and the law of domestic partnerships are identical. An analysis follows demonstrating that marriage is the foundation for the profoundly important family relationship, the intimacy and child rearing success of which in no way depends on the sexual orientation of its members. After extended legal and constitutional reasoning the Court arrives at the conclusion that the California legislation denying the name "marriage" to identical marital and domestic partner relationships impinges on the fundamental right to marry and unconstitutionally discriminates against same-sex marital relationships.

The Court does not create a new constitutional right to a same-sex marriage. Rather, it establishes that the right to marry applies to both same and opposite sex marital relationships. Relationships that are identical in terms of legal rights and duties deserve "equal dignity" including the same name. Accordingly, state legislation that denies the same name to those relationships denies that equal dignity.

Even more, in an inconspicuous corner of the Chief Justice's option he restates an established principle that also sheds light on the abortion and separation of church and state debates. Immediately after the San Francisco officials began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, the Proposition 22 Legal Defense Fund filed a suit claiming injury to their ideology and beliefs. But the Court said that ideology, belief, and a strong interest in an issue do not give someone the right to sue in California courts. Unless the Fund could demonstrate an actual injury, their convictions alone do not give them access to a court as a litigating party.

This conclusion clarifies and restates the established principle of a free society - belief and ideology cannot be imposed by law.