Clippings for Sunday 19 October 2008

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Waiting for the Barbarians
Richard Kim writes in an editoral for The Nation: "In case you haven't heard, there's a guy running for president named Barack Hussein Osama Nobama. This Nobama was born outside America and secretly schooled in Islamic terrorism at a Wahhabi madrassa. He then moved to the United States to take up the radical '60s teachings of the Weather Underground's Bill Ayers, while also organizing for ACORN, a subprime-lending, voter fraud-committing collective of affirmative-action welfare queens. All this happened before he became an elitist celebrity advocate of socialism, infanticide, the sexual abuse of children and treason. "

A Mighty Hoax From ACORN Grows
Michael Winship writes for Truthout: "You see, the ACORN 'election fraud' story is one of those urban legends, like fake moon landings and alligators in the sewers, and it appears three or four weeks before every recent national election with the regularity of the swallows returning to Capistrano."

Attack on Iran off the Table?
Ray McGovern - who is speakign this week in Manhattan and is this weel's Community bridge's guest - writes for CommonDreams.org: "On Sept. 23, the neo-conservative chiefs of the Washington Post's editorial page mourned, in a tone much like what one hears on the death of a close friend, that "a military strike by the United States or Israel [on Iran is not] likely in the coming months." One could almost hear a wistful sigh, as they complained that efforts to stop Iran's nuclear program has 'slipped down Washington's list of priorities...as Iran races toward accumulating enough uranium for a bomb.'"

McCain Takes Dishonorable Turn
Leonard Pitts Jr. writes for The McClatchy Newspapers: "Not to put too fine a point on it, but these are strange days. And it's difficult not to empathize with the Arizona senator, who has spent these last weeks flailing like a man trying to hit a fastball in the dark. His campaign has lurched about looking for ways to connect; the attempt to tie Barack Obama to Ayers, a onetime '60s radical, is among the most desperate and disappointing."

Recommended Audio: Progressive Radio
Two recent Progressive Radio show of interest. As a follow-up to our September 11th show with Stan Cox, listen to this week's broadcast featuring Barry Steinhardt, the director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program who explores the erosion of civil liberties under the Bush administration. Also check out last week's show featuring Stephen Schneider, climatologist from Stanford, who is one of the leading experts on global warming and takes on the Global Warming nay-sayers head on.

The 10 Biggests Difference between Obama and McCain that Will affect your Daily Life
AlterNet writes: "When the polls open in 18 days, voters will be faced with a stark choice in presidential candidates -- a choice that ultimately comes down to one question: What do you want the next four to eight years of your life to look like? Because the next president will shape the issues that affect the way we live our day-to-day lives."

How to Manage an Imperial Decline
Aziz Huq reports for TomDispatch.com: "Do empires end with a bang, a whimper, or the sibilant hiss of financial deflation? We may be about to find out. Right now, in the midst of the financial whirlwind, it's been hard in the United States to see much past the moment. Yet the ongoing economic meltdown has raised a range of non-financial issues of great importance for our future. Uncertainty and anxiety about the prospects for global financial markets - given the present liquidity crunch - have left little space for serious consideration of issues of American global power and influence."

The Torture Time Bomb
Philippe Sands writes for The Guardian UK: "The Bush administration allowed the US military and the CIA to embrace abusive techniques of interrogation - including waterboarding, in the case of the CIA - which violate the Geneva conventions and the 1984 UN torture convention. The torture issue's cancerous consequences go deep, and will cause headaches for the next president."

Guided by an Invisible Hand
Joseph Stiglitz writes in the New Statesman: "Make no mistake: we are witnessing the biggest crisis since the Great Depression. In some ways it is worse than the Great Depression, because the latter did not involve these very complicated instruments - the derivatives that Warren Buffett has referred to as financial weapons of mass destruction; and we did not have anything close to the magnitude of today's cross-border finance."

Private Military Contractors Writing the News? The Pentagon's Propaganda at Its Worst
Liliana Segura writes for AlterNet: "Less than a week after the Washington Post reported that the Department of Defense will pay private contractors $300 million over the next three years to 'produce news stories, entertainment programs and public service advertisements for the Iraqi media in an effort to "engage and inspire" the local population to support US objectives and the Iraqi government,' Virginia Sen. Jim Webb wrote a strongly worded letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates."

Murder of Military Women
Ann Wright writes for Truthout: "The October 14, 2008, editorial, 'Our View: Military Domestic Violence Needs More Aggressive Prevention,' by The Fayetteville Observer, focused on the murders of four military women in North Carolina and contained a startling comment: 'In a way, it's surprising that there aren't more bodies piling up at military bases all over this nation.' The Observer is the newspaper that serves Fort Bragg, one of the military's largest bases."