America Loves Peace? Odd, Since We’re Always at War

We’ve been in conflict for about half the period between World War II and the present but consider ourselves a “peace-loving” nation.

Americans love to think that we’re a peaceful people and that we fight wars only when we must.

Unfortunately, you can count in nanoseconds how long those assertions hold up when exposed to such insidious commie dirty tricks as the application of logic or the examination of empirical history.

Sure, any war can be spun as some necessity against some Very Bad Person, preferably of brown skin, slanted eyes and/or differing deity. Not only can any war be so spun, probably every war there ever was has been, at least since the days when governments had to start offering some justification or another for their little foreign adventures.

But pick your barometer — any one will work — and you’ll quickly see who the militant folks on the planet really are. For America, it turns out — gulp — to be that bloated, frightened meth-addict staring back at us in the mirror, not some overseas evil emperor du jour.

For example, suppose you wanted to measure comparative national warlike tendencies by simply counting wars. Since World War II, the United States has messed around, in ways big and small, in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Lebanon, Grenada, Iraq, Panama, Colombia, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, Afghanistan again, and Iraq again. No country in the world can begin to match this record in the last half-century. And I’m not even listing here the covert operations (almost everywhere), including the ones that toppled democratically elected governments (Iran, Guatemala, Chile, etc.), the long-term occupations of Latin American countries by the U.S. military, the gunboat diplomacy of the American Navy around the world, the aiding and abetting of other killers (Saddam invading Iran, for example, apartheid South Africa or the Israeli occupation of Palestine), the militarization of the oceans and of space, or the myriad other ways in which the United States leads the planet in aggressive tendencies. (For a whole century’s worth of overseas fun — not even counting the big stuff — Stephen Kinzer’s Overthrow is highly recommended reading.)

Who has China been invading lately? Russia? Fidel? Those perfidious (and perfumed) French? Heck, even Saddam couldn’t touch this record for aggression, especially once you account for the fact that the U.S. government assisted his foreign soiree into Iran (complete with the chemical weapons, of course) and likely green-lighted the one into Kuwait as well. And let’s even grant that one or two of those American adventures had some measure of altruism associated with them, as perhaps the Balkan or Somalian affairs might have (I’d like to know the full story before making that judgment). Isn’t the sheer volume of them — especially relative to the number of wars other countries have fought — a bit problematic for maintaining the pretense of America’s pacific intent? My conservative (in both senses of the word) list above goes to nearly 20. Isn’t that a bit much for a peace-loving country?

But scratch that measure if you must (perhaps it cuts too close to the bone). Maybe we can detect America’s dislike for war in another metric, say military spending. Oops. Turns out that’s going to be a bit problematic, too. I guess it won’t be a huge surprise to anybody that the United States spends more on “defense” than any other country in the world. But here’s the truly scary part: The United States not only outspends every other country in the world on military goodies, it outspends ALL other countries of the world. Combined. That’s right. Take all 190-plus countries out there and add together their defense budgets and you still won’t equal America’s alone. What’s more, that doesn’t even include the $100 billion or so that we’re dropping each year in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor the additional costs in veterans’ (so-called) care, munitions replacement and economic losses we have been hemorrhaging for those wars, which will continue, for decades to come, estimated to run up toward 2 trillion bucks total. (Oh, and did I mention that one-sixth of our population doesn’t have healthcare coverage? Never mind. I’m sure those are completely unrelated facts.) Anyhow, does that sound like a peace-loving country to you? And think about this for a second: How absolutely disastrous does your diplomacy have to get so that you need to be able to fight off every other country of the world, all at once?!

OK, OK, so that one didn’t work out so well either. The good news is that at least we don’t make the world an uglier place by continually inventing new and more vicious weaponry. Not us peace-loving Americans! You know, like atom bombs, napalm, bunker-busters, cluster bombs, neutron bombs, space lasers, phosphorous bombs and stuff like that! Who would build such things? What kind of depraved mind would harness so much of its scientific and industrial establishment to such ends? Who would … er … um … Hey, wait a minute! What do you mean that we invented and manufactured all those things?!?! I thought we were the peace-loving people! Meanwhile, can I interest you in some depleted uranium at a very, very attractive price?

OK, but we must be good neighbors, really, because we’re always the ones who are pushing for all sorts of international treaties to limit war, weapons and the worst practices of nasty governments. You know, for example, how we signed on to the United Nations Charter (which we more or less also wrote) and its requirement that states may use militarized aggression only in the case of self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council to do so in a collective security operation. Hey, sometimes we even comply with it! Or maybe you prefer the treaties against land mines, child soldiers or the weaponization of space, which we’re pretty much the only folks not signing? The “quaint” and “obsolete” Geneva Conventions against torture and war crimes? How about the International Criminal Court, which John Bolton led the Bush administration into singlehandedly trying to destroy? Hmmm … Wonder why they would have wanted to get rid of that? Gee, I thought genocide and war crimes were bad things! America is the world leader in supporting human rights and seeking peace. So, remember, if you hear someone tell you that we’ve been abdicating, avoiding, ignoring and destroying all these (and myriad other) treaties that seek to end or prevent war, it’s just the liberal America-hating media elites telling lies again, because they want us to lose our wars. (And why would they want that? That’s easy! So some other country can march in, take away their enormously profitable media franchises, steal their mansions and yachts, and then hang them for treason and pillaging, of course. Who wouldn’t trade their current set-up for that? Trust me, these guys know a good thing when they see it.)

Alright, alright, so it turns out that none of these measures of warlike tendencies turned out so very well. American is winning these contests about as often as is Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail. And with about as much grace, too. But at least the rest of the world thinks of us as nice, peaceful neighbors, right? Well, actually, they sometimes do! Just not now. And just not when we’re, uh, engaged in most of our wars, which has been about half the time between World War II and the present. Vietnam wasn’t exactly appreciated out there in the global community, and that opinion hasn’t changed a whole lot, even after we’ve established a lovely little trading relationship with that same communist country that we once argued would be so dangerous if it went … er, well, communist. You know, like China! That’s why we don’t trade with them now, or — perish the thought — make ourselves vulnerable by allowing them to finance our national binge borrowing. No sense aiding and abetting the enemy, eh?

Sorry — I digress. Despite ourselves, America is in fact sometimes admired in world opinion. But not when we play our war games. They can’t stand America’s duplicity, hypocrisy and arrogance when it comes to so many aspects of international diplomacy, including the aforementioned treaties we’ve avoided when we’re not trying to destroy them. Yet nothing has so inflamed world opinion as the gross transgression against international law and human morality that is Iraq. International polls show that even our allies believe that “the United States contributes the most to world instability along with Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and North Korea,” and that the U.S. presence in Iraq is considered a greater threat to peace than Iran going nuclear. America’s standing in world opinion isn’t the only measure of how comparatively warlike we are, but it certainly is a valid one. When everybody else in the neighborhood hates you, or hates something you do, it’s a moment for a little reflection and introspection, isn’t it? Unless, of course, you’re just an asshole. Then, why bother?

I don’t want to give the wrong impression. Much as I’d like to be, I’m not a pacifist, because I realize that there are genuinely bad actors out there who can’t be tamed by a Dick Cheney charm offensive, or beaten into submission by a Condoleeza Rice piano sonata. I’m glad the U.S. military was there to stomp Hitler. Maybe even Korea, Bosnia and Kosovo could be justified as a response to aggression, though here it gets murkier. But Vietnam? No way. Today’s Iraq war? Utterly shameful. The Mexican War? Spanish-American War? Cuba? Nicaragua? Guatemala? Grenada? Be serious. Way too often America’s pacific intentions are harder to find than the elusive Higgs Boson particle. Probably you’d need a massive supercollider and a bunch of expensive detection equipment to do it, too.

And god knows I’m not blaming the troops for this. Indeed, too often they’re the second victims (the truth being the first) of policymakers like Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton, for whom war is a game and people are pawns. When Bush says things like “This generation is rising to the challenge. We’re looking at history, we understand our values, and we’re laying that foundation of peace for generations to come,” smart countries run like hell. Others just laugh and cut mineral rights deals.

Because of these monsters and the record they’ve created, Americans have to face an ugly and unfortunate fact. Despite what your sixth-grade civics teacher told you, we’re not the white hats of the world. Or at least not often enough. We just like to think we are.

But thinking and being are, alas, two different things, as we found out going into Iraq — thinking we’d be greeted with chocolates and flowers.

We may get them yet, however. Perhaps they’ll be handed to us at the exit ramp, as the next president extricates a sobered United States from the disaster of its latest example of bringing love, American-style, to the world.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University. He is delighted to receive readers’ reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at www.regressiveantidote.net.

via//AlterNet

Anti-Muslim sentiment surfaces in attacks on Obama

By Michael Conlon

CHICAGO (Reuters) – The controversy caused by a photograph of Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama dressed in turban-topped African garb points to deeper anti-Muslim sentiment in U.S. society, some observers believe.

Ever since the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington Arabs generally and Muslims in particular have become the No. 1 villain in movies and television, according to Jack Shaheen, author of “Guilty – Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs After 9/11.”

“There’s no balance. It makes as much sense as projecting Asian or African-Americans as terrorists,” he said.

One of the most disturbing trends, he said, is that what started in Hollywood movies spread to television, and has gone from Arabs to Muslims in general.

“It’s the fact that he’s black, let’s be blunt about it,” and that the Somali tribal garb in the picture taken when Obama was on a visit to Kenya, his father’s homeland, reminds people of Muslim dress, Shaheen said.

The Obama campaign accused the campaign of rival Democrat Hillary Clinton of “the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering” when the photograph of the Illinois senator, turned up on a Web site this week.

The Clinton campaign denied releasing the photo.

Obama, a Christian, has fought a whispering campaign from fringe elements that say he is a Muslim. The Democratic front-runner’s middle family name — Hussein — has been used by some to draw a link between him and late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

“But it’s interesting,” Shaheen said, “no one has said so what? What if he were a Muslim?”

“PLAIN BIGOTED”

Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Chicago Chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations, said the photograph incident sent a poor message to any Muslim growing up in the United States with hopes of running for president.

“It goes against all that I advocate that the mere rumor of a person being a Muslim — let alone actually being one — could be a tool to destroy political aspirations,” he said in a commentary in the Chicago Tribune.

“When it comes to Muslims, the divisive rhetoric coming out of this year’s election ranges from the exclusionary to the just plain bigoted,” he said, adding that neither Obama nor any other candidate had adequately addressed the anti-Muslim climate.

Rehab said the photograph of Obama will be discounted by a large chunk of the electorate. “What I’m seeing now is a sense of cynicism .. you’ve had seven years of this crap,” he said.

“It is a sign of America’s progress that Obama is not eliminated from the public’s consideration because of his race,” remarked Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page in a recent commentary in that newspaper.

“Yet he is vulnerable to other prejudices,” he added, and impressions can tip the balance among those who are undecided.

Further attacks focusing on religion and identity seem likely as Obama becomes the favorite to win the Democratic nomination and compete in the November general election.

The Tennessee Republican Party this week put out a news release featuring the Obama photo, headlined “Anti-Semites for Obama” and referring to the Democrat as “Sen. Barack Hussein Obama.”

via//Reuters

related//Dallas Morning News, Huffington Post,  IPS

Obama should be proud to be named Hussein

The attacks on Barack Obama’s middle name have begun, but the likely Democratic nominee joins a long line of famous Americans with Semitic names, from Benjamin Franklin to Omar Bradley.

By Juan Cole

Feb. 29, 2008 | In Cincinnati, Bill Cunningham, according to the Los Angeles Times, introducing presidential candidate John McCain at a rally Tuesday, “ridiculed Democratic contender Barack Obama for his intention to meet with ‘world leaders who want to kill us’ and pointedly referred to the Illinois senator as ‘Barack Hussein Obama.’” John McCain repudiated Cunningham’s low tactics and said that using the middle name like that three times was “inappropriate” and would never happen again at one of his rallies.

I want to say something about Barack Hussein Obama’s name. It is a name to be proud of. It is an American name. It is a blessed name. It is a heroic name, as heroic and American in its own way as the name of Gen. Omar Nelson Bradley or the name of Benjamin Franklin. And denigrating that name is a form of racial and religious bigotry of the most vile and debased sort. It is a prejudice against names deriving from Semitic languages!

Christian, Western heroes have often been bequeathed Middle Eastern names. Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, the medieval Spanish hero, carried the name El Cid, from the Arabic al-Sayyid, “the Lord.”

Barack and Hussein are Semitic words. Americans have been named with Semitic names since the founding of the republic. Fourteen of our 43 presidents have had Semitic names (see below). And American English contains many Arabic-derived words that we use every day and without which we would be much impoverished. America is a world civilization with a world heritage, something Cunningham will never understand.

Barack is a Semitic word meaning “to bless” as a verb or “blessing” as a noun. In its Hebrew form, barak, it is found all through the Bible. It first occurs in Genesis 1:22 — “And God blessed (ḇāreḵə) them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.”

Here is a list of how many times barak appears in each book of the Bible.

Now let us take the name “Hussein.” It is from the Semitic word hasan, meaning “good” or “handsome.” Husayn is the diminutive, affectionate form.

Barack Obama’s middle name is in honor of his grandfather, Hussein, a secular resident of Nairobi, Kenya. Americans may think of Saddam Hussein when they hear the name, but that is like thinking of Stalin when you hear the name Joseph. There have been lots of Husseins in history, from the grandson of the prophet Mohammed, a hero who touched the historian Gibbon, to King Hussein of Jordan, one of America’s most steadfast allies in the 20th century. The author of the beloved American novel “The Kite Runner” is Khaled Hosseini.

But in Obama’s case, it is just a reference to his grandfather.

It is worth pointing out that John McCain’s adopted daughter, Bridget, is originally from Bangladesh. Since Hussein is a very common name in Bangladesh, it is entirely possible that her birth father or grandfather was named Hussein. McCain certainly has Muslim relatives via adoption in his family. If Muslim relatives are a disqualification from high office in the United States, then McCain himself is in trouble. In fact, since Bridget is upset that George W. Bush doesn’t like her “because she is black,” and used her to stop the McCain campaign in South Carolina in 2000, you understand why McCain would be especially sensitive to race baiting of Cunningham’s sort. The question is how vigorously he will combat it; he hasn’t been above Muslim taunting in the campaign so far. (And the McCains really should let Bridget know that she is Asian, not “black.” The poor girl; Bush and Rove have done a number on her, and Cindy’s confusion can’t help.)

The other thing to say about grandfathers named Hussein is that very large numbers of African-Americans probably have an ancestor 10 or 11 generations ago with that name, in what is now Mali or Senegal or Nigeria. And since so many thousands of Arab Muslims were made to convert to Catholicism in Spain after 1501, many Latinos have distant ancestors named Hussein, too. In fact, since there was a lot of Arab-Spanish intermarriage, and since there was subsequent Spanish intermarriage with other European Catholics, more European Americans are descended from a Hussein than they realize. The British royal family is quite forthright about the Arab line in its ancestry going back to Andalusia.

Obama, being a cousin of Dick Cheney on one side and having relatives in Kenya on the other, is just more and more typical of the 21st century United States.

So, anyway, Obama’s first two names mean “blessing, the good.” If we are lucky enough to get him for president, we can only hope that his names are prophetic for us.

Which brings me to Omar Bradley. Omar is an alternative spelling of Umar, i.e., Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph of Sunni Islam. Presumably Gen. Bradley was named for the poet Omar Khayyam, who bore the caliph’s name. Omar Khayyam’s “Rubaiyat,” in the “translation” of Edward FitzGerald, became enormously popular in Victorian America.

Gen. Omar Bradley, who bore a Semitic, Muslim first name, and shared it with the second caliph of Sunni Islam, was the hero of D-day and Normandy, of the Battle of the Bulge and the Ruhr.

Would Cunningham see Omar Bradley as un-American, as an enemy because of his name?

What about other American heroes, such as Gen. George Joulwan, former NATO supreme allied commander of Europe? “Joulwan” is an Arabic name. Or there is Gen. John Abizaid, former CENTCOM commander. Abizaid is an Arabic name. Abi means Abu or “father of,” and Zaid is a common Arab first name. Is Cunningham good enough to wipe their shoes? Is he going to call them traitors because they have Arabic names?

What about Rep. Darrell Issa of California? (“‘Isa” means Jesus in Arabic). Former Cabinet secretary Donna Shalala? (Shalala means “waterfall” in Arabic.)

I won’t go into all the great Americans with Arabic names in sports, entertainment and business, against whom Cunningham would apparently discriminate on that basis. Does he want to take citizenship away from Kareem Abdul Jabbar (meaning “noble the servant of the Mighty”) and Ahmad Jamal (meaning “the most praised, beauty”)? What about Rihanna (“sweet basil,” “aromatic”)? And Tony Shalhoub (i.e., Mr. Monk)?

Let us take Benjamin Franklin. His first name is from the Hebrew Bin Yamin, the son of the Right (hand), or the son of strength, or the son of the South (yamin or right has lots of connotations). The “Bin” means “son of,” just as in modern colloquial Arabic. Bin Yamin Franklin is not a dishonorable name because of its Semitic root. By the way, there are lots of Muslims named Bin Yamin.

As for an American president bearing a name derived from a Semitic language, that is hardly unprecedented.

John Adams really only had Semitic names. His first name is from the Hebrew Yochanan, or gift of God, which became Johan and then John. (In German and in medieval English, “y” is represented by “j” but was originally pronounced “y.”) Adams is from the biblical Adam, which also just means “human being.” In Arabic, one way of saying “human being” is “Bani Adam,” the children of men.

Thomas Jefferson’s first name is from the Aramaic Tuma, meaning “twin.” Aramaic is a Semitic language spoken by Jesus, which is related to Hebrew and Arabic. In Arabic, twin is tau’am, so you can see the similarity.

James Madison, James Monroe and James Polk all had a Semitic first name, derived from the Hebrew Ya’aqov or Jacob, which is Ya’qub in Arabic. It became Iacobus in Latin, then was corrupted to Iacomus, and from there became James in English.

Zachary Taylor’s first name is from the Hebrew Zachariah, which means “the Lord has remembered.”

Abraham Lincoln, of course, is named for the patriarch Abraham, from the Semitic word for father, Ab, and the word for “multitude,” raham. Abu, “father of,” is a common element in Arab names today.

So, Mr. Cunningham, Barack Hussein Obama fits right in this list of presidents with Semitic names. In fact, we haven’t had one for a while. We are due for another one.

A blessed and good one.

via//Salon.com

Pelosi wants Bush aides investigated

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked the Justice Department on Thursday to open a grand jury investigation into whether President Bush’s chief of staff and former counsel should be prosecuted for contempt of Congress.

Pelosi, D-Calif., demanded that the department pursue misdemeanor charges against former White House counsel Harriet Miers for refusing to testify to Congress about the firings of federal prosecutors in 2006 and against chief of staff Josh Bolten for failing to turn over White House documents related to the dismissals.

She gave Attorney General Michael Mukasey one week to respond and said refusal to take the matter to a grand jury will result in the House’s filing a civil lawsuit against the Bush administration.

The White House branded the request as “truly contemptible.” The Justice Department said it had received Pelosi’s request and anticipated providing further guidance after Mukasey’s review. It noted “long-standing department precedent” in such cases against letting a U.S. attorney refer a congressional contempt citation to a grand jury or prosecute an executive branch. The top House Republican called it “a partisan political stunt” and “a complete waste of time,” according to a spokesman.

The Democratic-controlled House voted two weeks ago to hold Bolten and Miers in contempt for failing to cooperate with committee investigations.

“There is no authority by which persons may wholly ignore a subpoena and fail to appear as directed because a president unilaterally instructs them to do so,” Pelosi wrote Mukasey. She noted that Congress subpoenaed Miers to appear before the House Judiciary Committee, which is investigating the firings.

“Surely, your department would not tolerate that type of action if the witness were subpoenaed to a federal grand jury,” Pelosi wrote.

She added: “Short of a formal assertion of executive privilege, which cannot be made in this case, there is no authority that permits a president to advise anyone to ignore a duly issued congressional subpoena for documents.”

Pelosi sent an additional letter to U.S. Attorney Jeff Taylor, the chief federal prosecutor for the District of Columbia, whose office would oversee the grand jury. The letters point to sections of federal law that require the Justice Department to bring the House contempt citations before a grand jury to investigate.

At the White House, spokesman Tony Fratto said House Democrats “have been trying to redefine the notion of contempt and they succeeded.”

Both Fratto and House GOP leader John Boehner said the House should focus on passing legislation allowing the government to more easily eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mails of suspected terrorists.

“Rather than passing critical national security legislation, they continue to squander time on partisan hijinx,” Fratto said. Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said “this sort of pandering to the left-wing fever swamps of loony liberal activists does nothing to make America safer.”

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. John Conyers, said he hoped Pelosi’s demand would spur the department to “put the partisan manipulation of our system of justice behind it” and take the issue to a grand jury. “To do otherwise would turn on its head the notion that we are all equally accountable under the law,” said Conyers, D-Mich.

But the department told the House leadership last July that it generally would not let a U.S. attorney make a grand jury referral or prosecute executive branch officials when they followed a president’s instruction and invoked a claim of executive privilege before a congressional committee, spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said.

The letter was the latest chapter in a yearlong saga that began with the firings of nine federal prosecutors and led to Alberto Gonzales’ resignation as attorney general last August.

The House voted 223-32 this month to hold Miers and Bolten in contempt for failing to cooperate with an inquiry into whether the prosecutors’ firings were politically motivated. Angry Republicans boycotted the vote and staged a walkout in an unusually bitter scene even for the fractious House.

At the time, the Bush administration was no less harsh, saying the information sought by the House was off-limits under executive privilege and that Bolten and Miers were immune from prosecution.

It was the first time in 25 years that a full chamber of Congress voted on a contempt of Congress citation. The White House pointed out that it was the first time that such action had been taken against top White House officials who had been instructed by the president to remain silent to preserve executive privilege.

via//Seattle Post-Intelligencer

You can’t be serious, Ralph …

Ralph Nader sure knows how to marginalize his candidacy for president: He picked a brooding, far-left running mate who couldn’t get elected mayor of San Francisco.

Perhaps Nader sees a younger version of himself in 42-year-old Matt Gonzalez. Each wields a keen intellect, a certitude about his standing in the political struggle between good and evil, and a certain obliviousness to how his ego can get in the way of the cause.

Nader expresses not the least bit of remorse that his 2000 run on the Green Party ticket helped tilt Florida, and thus the presidency, to George W. Bush, in an excruciatingly close race. And he is undeterred by the prospect that he could be a spoiler again. If Democrats can’t win by a landslide in 2008, Nader has suggested, they might as well “wrap up, close down, emerge in a different form.”

“Wrap up, close down” is a pretty fair description of what happened to the progressive movement that Gonzalez energized in his 2003 race against Gavin Newsom. Outspent 5-to-1, Gonzalez gave Newsom – and the city’s Democratic establishment – a big scare by drawing 47 percent of the vote. The Green Party suddenly was poised to greatly expand its foothold in San Francisco.

Within months, however, Gonzalez announced that he was leaving politics to practice law.

The city’s progressive movement was without its endearingly enigmatic apostle, and Newsom coasted to re-election last year.

There is no need to recount all the reasons why Gonzalez was ill suited to be mayor of San Francisco. Let’s just say that an aloofness and ideological rigidity that sometimes undermined his effectiveness at City Hall – in his first two years as supervisor, he would not meet with Mayor Willie Brown – is not going to play in Peoria.

If Republicans were to take the Nader-Gonzalez ticket seriously, they would have a field day with the former supervisor’s proposal to let noncitizens vote in local elections. They would mock the energy he invested into labeling owners of cats and dogs as “pet guardians.” They would resurrect his jailings for contempt of court when he was public defender.

Rest assured, the Republican attack machine will not waste a drop of vitriol on Nader and Gonzalez. Each “progressive” vote they woo will be another small step forward for John McCain.

Report: Record-high ratio of Americans in prison

Some states spend more on prison than higher education

NEW YORK – For the first time in U.S. history, more than one of every 100 adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report documenting America’s rank as the world’s No. 1 incarcerator. It urges states to curtail corrections spending by placing fewer low-risk offenders behind bars.

Using state-by-state data, the report says 2,319,258 Americans were in jail or prison at the start of 2008 _ one out of every 99.1 adults. Whether per capita or in raw numbers, it’s more than any other nation.

The report, released Thursday by the Pew Center on the States, said the 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier. The rate of increase for prison costs was six times greater than for higher education spending, the report said.

The steadily growing inmate population “is saddling cash-strapped states with soaring costs they can ill afford and failing to have a clear impact either on recidivism or overall crime,” the report said.

Susan Urahn, managing director of the Pew Center on the States, said budget woes are pressuring many states to consider new, cost-saving corrections policies that might have been shunned in the recent past for fear of appearing soft on crime.

“We’re seeing more and more states being creative because of tight budgets,” she said in an interview. “They want to be tough on crime. They want to be a law-and-order state. But they also want to save money, and they want to be effective.”

The report cited Kansas and Texas as states that have acted decisively to slow the growth of their inmate population. They are making greater use of community supervision for low-risk offenders and employing sanctions other than reimprisonment for offenders who commit technical violations of parole and probation rules.

“The new approach, born of bipartisan leadership, is allowing the two states to ensure they have enough prison beds for violent offenders while helping less dangerous lawbreakers become productive, taxpaying citizens,” the report said.

While many state governments have shown bipartisan interest in curbing prison growth, there also are persistent calls to proceed cautiously.

“We need to be smarter,” said David Muhlhausen, a criminal justice expert with the conservative Heritage Foundation. “We’re not incarcerating all the people who commit serious crimes. But we’re also probably incarcerating people who don’t need to be.”

According to the report, the inmate population increased last year in 36 states and the federal prison system.

The largest percentage increase _ 12 percent _ was in Kentucky, where Gov. Steve Beshear highlighted the cost of corrections in his budget speech last month. He noted that the state’s crime rate had increased only about 3 percent in the past 30 years, while the state’s inmate population has increased by 600 percent.

The report was compiled by the Pew Center’s Public Safety Performance Project, which is working with 13 states on developing programs to divert offenders from prison without jeopardizing public safety.

“Getting tough on criminals has gotten tough on taxpayers,” said the project’s director, Adam Gelb.

According to the report, the average annual cost per prisoner was $23,876, with Rhode Island spending the most ($44,860) and Louisiana the least ($13,009). It said California _ which faces a $16 billion budget shortfall _ spent $8.8 billion on corrections last year, while Texas, which has slightly more inmates, was a distant second with spending of $3.3 billion.

On average, states spend 6.8 percent of their general fund dollars on corrections, the report said. Oregon had the highest spending rate, at 10.9 percent; Alabama the lowest at 2.6 percent.

Four states _ Vermont, Michigan, Oregon and Connecticut _ now spend more on corrections than they do on higher education, the report said.

“These sad facts reflect a very distorted set of national priorities,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, referring to the full report. “Perhaps, if we adequately invested in our children and in education, kids who now grow up to be criminals could become productive workers and taxpayers.”

The report said prison growth and higher incarceration rates do not reflect an increase in the nation’s overall population. Instead, it said, more people are behind bars mainly because of tough sentencing measures, such as “three-strikes” laws, that result in longer prison stays.

“For some groups, the incarceration numbers are especially startling,” the report said. “While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine.”

The racial disparity for women also is stark. One of every 355 white women aged 35 to 39 is behind bars, compared with one of every 100 black women in that age group.

The nationwide figures, as of Jan. 1, include 1,596,127 people in state and federal prisons and 723,131 in local jails. That’s out of almost 230 million American adults.

The report said the United States incarcerates more people than any other nation, far ahead of more populous China with 1.5 million people behind bars. It said the U.S. also is the leader in inmates per capita (750 per 100,000 people), ahead of Russia (628 per 100,000) and other former Soviet bloc nations which round out the Top 10.

The U.S. also is among the world leaders in capital punishment. According to Amnesty International, its 53 executions in 2006 were exceeded only by China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and Sudan.

On the Net:

http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org.

via//Sioux City Journal

Want Votes? Take On Nader’s Issues

Instead of criticizing Ralph Nader for exercising his rights as an American citizen to run for public office, Adrienne Fulco should be encouraging her Democratic Party candidate to adopt Nader’s positions on the issues.

If Barack Obama campaigned for true universal, single-payer health care, slashing the military budget and ending corporate abuses of power, there would be no need for a progressive third-party candidate. Remember, the two major political parties do not own the political process.

Equally troubling is the continued insistence by some Democrats that Nader, all by himself, lost the 2000 election for Al Gore. Why, out of all the factors that contributed to that fiasco (Gore losing his home state, five other third-party candidates pulling more votes in Florida than needed by Gore to win, the Democrats not fighting harder during the Florida recount and court proceedings), do they continue to pick on old Ralph?

If the Democrats want my vote, they should stop scapegoating Ralph and start being more democratic.

via//Hartford Courant
related//Globe and Mail: Nader denounces ‘trivializing’ objections to his third run

Bill Buckley is dead. Has conservatism died with him?

David Boaz

William F. Buckley Jr., the father of the modern conservative movement, has died at 82. The bigger question is, has conservatism died, too?

Buckley emerged as a public intellectual in 1951, shortly after graduating from Yale University, with his book “God and Man at Yale,” the first conservative complaint against the dominance of liberals at leading universities. Four years later, he started National Review, the magazine that really launched modern conservatism.

Buckley skillfully brought together libertarians, traditionalists, and anti-communists, including ex-communists who’d seen the light. While they had many philosophical differences that were often thrashed out in the pages of National Review, they agreed on a few large principles, notably opposition to communism internationally and to moves toward socialism at home.

Buckley’s home in Sharon, Conn., also served as the birthplace of Young Americans for Freedom, which became the nation’s largest conservative youth group. The group’s Sharon Statement outlined the principles of modern conservatism: individual liberty, limited government, the U.S. Constitution, federalism, the free-market economy and a strong national defense.

Those were the principles that Buckley and the conservatives in his orbit advanced from National Review’s founding in 1955, through the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign in 1964 and on to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and even the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. Conservatives who had been inspired by Buckley and Goldwater believed in 1980 and 1994 that their movement had finally achieved success.

In the 1994 Contract with America, conservatives declared that they would deliver “the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public’s money.” Then in 2000, for the first time Republicans took control of both houses of Congress and the White House. At last, conservatives believed, they would be able to deliver on the agenda they had been advancing for decades.

What happened? Republicans increased federal spending by a trillion dollars in six years. They passed the biggest expansion of entitlements since the LBJ years. They federalized education. They gave unprecedented power to the executive. They launched a massive nation-building project thousands of miles from home, to do in Iraq what conservatives would never expect government to do in the United States.

Even worse, the conservative intellectual movement abandoned its limited-government roots. The neoconservatives, who drifted over from the radical left, brought their commitment to an expansive government intimately involved in shaping the social and economic life of the nation. They transformed conservatism from rugged individualism to “national greatness.” The religious right demanded that government impose their social values on the whole country. Conservatives who had once rallied to a famous Reagan declaration – that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” – became loyal supporters of George W. Bush, who said, rather differently, “When somebody hurts, government has got to move.”

Buckley’s conservatives decried the shift of power from the states to the federal government and from Congress to the imperial presidency. Russell Kirk, a founding editor of National Review, wrote that conservatives seek to “limit and balance political power.” But in the Bush years, conservatives have sought to nationalize education, marriage law, family medical decisions and gun crimes.

Conservatives also became cheerleaders for a presidency untrammeled by courts or Congress, especially in matters of foreign affairs. Kirk once wrote that war must be a last resort, lest it “make the American President a virtual dictator, diminish the constitutional powers of Congress, contract civil liberties, injure the habitual self-reliance and self-government of the American people, distort the economy, sink the federal government in debt, (and) break in upon private and public morality.” But now conservatives insist that Congress stay out of Bush’s way as he prosecutes an endless war.

As Gene Healy writes in “The Cult of the Presidency,” conservatives who spent the 1990s warning that a venal and unscrupulous man had assumed the presidency have “spent much of the current decade trying to tear down checks on that office’s power.”

Bill Buckley had come to recognize the degraded state of American conservatism. In 2006, he deplored Bush’s “absence of effective conservative ideology – with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending.” And he noted the failure of Bush’s expansive, interventionist foreign policy.

“If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we’ve experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign,” Buckley told CBS News. No “successor would reenunciate the words he used in his second inaugural address because they were too ambitious.”

R.I.P. American conservatism.

David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute and author of “The Politics of Freedom”.

via//San Francisco Chronicle

Pentagon General Counsel Resigns

by ROSS TUTTLE

William J. Haynes, the Pentagon’s chief legal officer and overseer of Guantanamo’s Military Commissions, is stepping down, amid mounting controversy over the tribunal process, so he can “return to private life,” the Department of Defense announced late on Monday. Haynes’ resignation comes exactly two weeks after landmark charges were brought against six “high-value” Guantanamo detainees.

Haynes “has served the Department of Defense and the nation with distinction,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in a statement. But Haynes will leave behind a commissions process that is embattled and discredited–and he bears much of the blame.

Haynes, who is legal counsel for the Pentagon–having served both Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates–has long been criticized for his role in crafting the Bush Administration’s policies regarding the interrogation and detention of prisoners captured in the “war on terror.”

His infamous memos and public statements advocated torture and the denial of habeas corpus for detainees. In a 2002 memo, he recommended techniques such as “twenty-hour interrogations, isolation for up to thirty days, deprivation of light and auditory stimuli…and stress positions such as the proposed standing for four hours.” In response to this last technique, Haynes’s boss at the time, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, wrote in the memo’s margins, “I stand 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours.” Haynes also wanted to keep death threats, waterboarding and exposure to extreme temperatures on the table as interrogation methods. He stated, “Fact: The detainees currently held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are not protected by the Geneva Conventions.”

These positions and actions have led to international condemnation and a stalemate in the prosecution of Guantánamo detainees. Only one case–that of Australian David Hicks–has been adjudicated in six years.

Criticism of Haynes has sharpened in the wake of the October resignation of the Chief Prosecutor of Guantánamo’s military commissions, Col. Morris Davis, who charged that Haynes and other political appointees were interfering unlawfully in the process. Davis resigned when Haynes was inserted above him in the chain of command, saying, “Everyone has opinions, but when he was put above me, his opinions become orders.” In a Washington Post op-ed last year, Davis wrote that he had felt pressure to prosecute cases deemed “sexy” in the run-up to the 2008 elections.

And just last week, Col. Davis made the startling claim, in an exclusive interview with The Nation, that Haynes, who oversees both the prosecution and defense, said to him, “We can’t have acquittals, we have to have convictions.” According to Davis, Haynes said, “if we’ve been holding these people for so long, how can we explain letting them get off?”

Reached for comment about Haynes resignation, Col. Davis, who believes that given proper supervision the commissions can be successful, says he’s not celebrating yet. “It’s a positive step, but there are still several people who share his [Haynes's] views that are still standing in the way of the process,” he said, referring to convening authority Susan Crawford and her legal adviser Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann.

Davis has been troubled by the extent of Hartmann’s interference in the prosecution, believing that the prosecutor’s office needs to be independent in order to perform its duties and that the convening authority should be neutral. However, Hartmann, who reports to Haynes, interpreted his duties more broadly, and according to an internal report he “sees the Legal Adviser’s role as being the supervisor of the Chief Prosecutor.”

Lt. Brian Mizer, defense counsel for Salim Hamdan, alleged driver of Osama bin Laden, had a similar reaction to Haynes’s resignation. “It’s an important step in the process in bringing credibility to the military commissions, but it’s going to be insufficient to remove the unlawful influence that Col. Davis has talked about,” said Mizer from his Virginia-based office.

But Mizer is less optimistic about the prospects for a just process in general: “It will never make this system of justice acceptable. We’ve removed fundamental rights that our country was based upon–the right to confront accusers, the right to remain silent, and no amount of resignations are going to cure those aspects of the Military Commissions Act,” he said–referring to the controversial 2006 act of Congress that created the framework for the current commissions system.

The Pentagon’s brief statement left open room for speculation about the reasons for Haynes’s departure.

Col. Davis, who was surprised that such an announcement would come so late in the Administration’s second term, suggested that “there may have been some opportunity that was just too good to pass up.” After the circulation of the press release, it was reported that Haynes will be going to an in-house position at a major corporation.)

As far as Haynes’s future is concerned, there is a possibility that he could be pursued as a perpetrator of war crimes in a foreign country. Indeed, Haynes, along with Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales and other Bush Administration appointees, were charged in Germany in 2006 with war crimes, but the charges were withdrawn due to insufficient evidence.

As the tribunals march on, Col. Davis has recently agreed to testify at a pretrial hearing in April for Lt. Commander Mizer’s client Salim Hamdan. Mizer will raise a motion to dismiss charges based on unlawful interference by political appointees, and Davis will be one of his witnesses. He will reiterate claims he made publicly about Crawford’s and Hartmann’s roles in the prosecution.

As Davis puts it, “the house isn’t clean yet.”

via//The Nation

Majority of Israelis want to negotiate with Hamas

 by Glen Greenwald

Last Sunday, Barack Obama gave a speech to a group of Jewish leaders in Cleveland, rejected the manipulative claim that one must “adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach” or else be deemed “soft or anti-Israel,” and then (delicately) made this critical point regarding the range of acceptable debate in the U.S. with regard to Israel:

There was a very honest, thoughtful debate taking place inside Israel. All of you, I’m sure, have experienced this when you travel there. Understandably, because of the pressure that Israel is under, I think the U.S. pro-Israel community is sometimes a little more protective or concerned about opening up that conversation. But all I’m saying though is that actually ultimately should be our goal, to have that same clear-eyed view about how we approach these issues.

On virtually every issue concerning Israel, views that are held by substantial minorities or even majorities of Israelis themselves are deemed prohibited in the U.S., ones that inevitably subject the advocate to accusations of animus towards Israel or even anti-Semitism. There are very few issues in mainstream American political discourse with a narrower range of mandated orthodoxies than those which relate to Israel.Underscoring that point rather vividly is the issue of negotiations with Hamas. Needless to say, isolating the democratically elected Hamas government and childishly pretending that they don’t exist is a central prong of the Bush administration’s policy, and few American politicians could ever get away with advocating that Israel attempt diplomatically to negotiate its conflicts with Hamas. Cascades of “anti-Israel,” “soft-on-Terrorists” and other related accusations would pour down on any person suggesting such a thing.

But a new poll of actual Israelis — the people who have to live with the consequences of their choices as opposed to those who can beat their neoconservative, protected chests from a safe distance — reveals:

Sixty-four percent of Israelis say the government must hold direct talks with the Hamas government in Gaza toward a cease-fire and the release of captive soldier Gilad Shalit. Less than one-third (28 percent) still opposes such talks.The figures were obtained in a Haaretz-Dialog poll conducted Tuesday under the supervision of Professor Camil Fuchs of Tel Aviv University.

According to the findings, Israelis are fed up with seven years of Qassam rockets falling on Sderot and the communities near Gaza, as well as the fact that Shalit has been held captive for more than a year and a half. An increasing number of public figures, including senior officers in the Israel Defense Forces’ reserves, have expressed similar positions on talks with Hamas.

It now appears that this opinion is gaining traction in the wider public, which until recently vehemently rejected such negotiations.

The survey also showed that Likud voters are much more moderate than their Knesset representatives. About half (48 percent) support talks with Hamas.

In Kadima, 55 percent are for talks, while among Labor voters, the number jumps to 72 percent.

As these public opinion trends reflect, the mindless, simplistic belligerence that right-wing Jewish groups in the U.S. have been imposing as orthodoxies — “it’s appeasement to negotiate with the Terrorists” — is anything but “pro-Israel,” to say nothing of whether such militarism is “pro-U.S.” While Israelis increasingly reject this sort of Manichean, war-seeking approach as counter-productive to their interests, neoconservative dogma remains the only choice in the U.S. for those who want to remain in the mainstream and avoid charges of being anti-Israel, as reflected by this sort of “thinking” from Condoleezza Rice:

Hamas is a little more than an enemy of the United States. Hamas, of course, is a terrorist organization — listed by Europeans as a terrorist organization. And we saw what Hamas did in Gaza, when they threw people off of buildings and then knelt to pray. The violence in the Palestinian territories, and Gaza in particular, is directly related to Hamas activities. So to somehow engage Hamas and to reward that activity would make no sense. . . .With Hamas, we certainly would not [negotiate]. They’re a terrorist organization, and they’re devoted to the destruction of Israel. There’s not much to talk about.

How can that view be equated with being “pro-Israel” or “strongly supportive of Israel” if most Israelis think it’s destructive to their interests? That’s similar to the “reasoning” which has long claimed that we must continue to occupy Iraq for the good of the Iraqi people even though the vast majority of actual Iraqis have long favored a quick end to our occupation of their country. How can withdrawal from Iraq be deemed a betrayal of Iraqis when Iraqis themselves favor that? And how can views which many Israelis hold possibly be deemed “anti-Israel”?The point here isn’t that Israel should negotiate with Hamas but the perverse tools used to manipulate our political debate. With regard to virtually every issue, the right-wing American Jewish factions which act as arbiters for what views are “pro-Israel” and what views signify “anti-Israeli” animus or even anti-Semitism actually represent a minority — often a small minority — of Jews generally, and their views are sometimes even rejected by a majority of Israelis.

There are few things as consequential for America’s interests as its inseparable attachment to right-wing factions in Israel. Paradoxically, there are, at the same time, few issues less amenable to open debate than that attachment. At the very least, Americans ought to be able to advocate views that are held by a substantial portion of Israelis without being subject to accusations that they are “anti-Israel” or “soft on Israel.” Whatever else is true, America’s foreign policies towards the Middle East over the last seven years have been an unmitigated disaster and every aspect of it ought to be open to serious reconsideration without debate-suffocating tactics being used to close off such discussion.

UPDATE: Here’s a vivid reminder of how these debate-suffocating tactics operate, from an excellent 2003 Salon article by Michelle Goldberg detailing how Joe Lieberman and John Kerry sought to depict Howard Dean (whose campaign chairman was a former AIPAC Chairman, whose wife is Jewish and whose children were raised as Jews) as an Israel-hater due to the slightest (really indetectable) deviations from right-wing hawkish orthodoxy on Israel (and it’s a sure sign of what is to be attemped if Obama is the nominee, as Tim Russert’s repulsive behavior last night demonstrated):

Last Saturday, John Kerry gleefully predicted that Democratic rival Howard Dean was “imploding” over Israel. A meme was spreading in the Democratic Party that the former Vermont governor is insufficiently Zionist, that his views represent the antiwar fringe that’s said to constitute his base. An Israeli newspaper had predicted that Jewish donors would shun him. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote him an admonitory letter. Political strategists waxed catastrophic.What made the uproar so odd is that Dean’s Israel policy hardly differs from that of Bush and his main Democratic challengers. His campaign is being co-chaired by Steven Grossman, who from 1992 to 1996 was president of AIPAC, America’s most powerful pro-Israel lobby. . . .“His position on the Middle East is a right-of-center position,” says Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan. . . . Either way, Dean is seen as having deviated from the narrow parameters in which Israel can be discussed in American politics. That threatens to slow his momentum, dampen his fundraising and tarnish his political reputation.

Yet Dean has been cast as the left-of-center candidate, and the self-propelling narrative of the current campaign ensures that nearly everything he says will be interpreted according to that conventional wisdom. And few issues in American politics are as sensitive as Israel, making a mere hint of dissent from the AIPAC line politically hazardous, even for a candidate whose campaign is being run by an AIPAC vet.

As The Nation’s John Nichols recounted back then, all of these attacks on Dean stemmed from his rather mild argument that the U.S. ought to be more “evenhanded” in attempting to forge peace in the Middle East, and Nichols noted:

Democrats who want to deny Howard Dean the party’s 2004 presidential nomination have a new issue: They are complaining that the front-runner is insufficiently unequivocal in his support for Israel. But the criticisms have more to do with domestic politics than international affairs, and members of Congress who attack Dean’s relatively moderate statements regarding relations between Israel and Palestine are signaling that it is no easier to debate Middle East policy in the Democratic Party than in George Bush’s GOP.

As Jonathan Tobin noted in the journal Jewish Exponent, “the decision of Lieberman to use the Israel issue against Dean is interesting because it may be his best chance to rally Jewish voters to his flagging campaign.” Nonetheless, after that wave of “controversy” erupted over his Israel statements, Dean — as Goldberg put it — “quickly backtracked, distancing himself from any damaging suggestion of evenhandedness.”Our political debate over Israel is suffocated by the bullying, manipulative tactics of the Joe Liebermans and Abe Foxmans — as though they unilaterally determine what is “pro-Israel” — even though they represent a minority, often even a fringe, of Jews and Israelis generally.

via//Salon.com

Hillary Clinton landed punches but failed to damage Obama

Candidates agreed only during question of allegiance for Israel

Hillary Clinton last night punched, kicked, scratched and mauled at Barack Obama – but failed to inflict enough damage to change the dynamic of a presidential contest before elections next week she must win to get her faltering White House run back on course.

In their 20th debate in the race for the Democratic nomination, Mrs Clinton was combative and determined throughout, repeatedly referring to herself as a “fighter” or prefacing remarks by saying – in a reference to Mr Obama’s speeches – “I’m not just talking about it.”

Her eyes glittered with aggression while she regularly pursed her lips, shook her head and folded her arms impatiently as her rival answered questions.

However, Mrs Clinton’s attempts to argue that she would be stronger on foreign policy than her counterpart appeared to have been undermined when she stumbled over the name of the man expected to be Russia’s next president, Dmitri Medvedev, while predicting that he would not be an independent leader.

When asked at a debate whether she knew the name of the chosen successor to President Putin, Mrs Clinton struggled to get it out, finally saying: “Medvedev – whatever.”

Mr Obama, who also failed to pronounce his name, was tense but calm during the 90-minute exchange, staring down at his notes and sometimes smiling at her efforts to knock him off course.

Both sides knew the stakes were sky high in their final face-to-face appearance before Tuesday’s votes in Ohio and Texas where Mr Obama’s gathering momentum has seen him already close – or wipe out – Mrs Clinton’s long-standing polling leads.

The first significant clash came with Mrs Clinton sounding sarcastic – even plaintive – as she vented some of the frustration that has been building within her campaign as Mr Obama scored 11 straight victories over her this month.

Citing a recent TV comedy sketch which parodied the media’s allegedly fawning attitude to Mr Obama, she said: “Can I just point out that in the last several debates, I seem to get the first question all the time?

“I do find it curious, and if anybody saw ‘Saturday Night Live,’ you know, maybe we should ask Barack if he’s comfortable and needs another pillow?”

Her aides later claimed this was an attempt at humour, but the jeers it drew from some sections of the audience suggested that the tone of resentment with which she delivered it had caused the joke to fall flat.

When shown a video clip of Mrs Clinton deriding his messianic oratory as bring forth a “celestial choir”, Mr Obama said he would “give her points for delivery” and understood her argument, but wanted to make clear he was not running for president just to make speeches.

The two candidates were asked about bitter exchanges of recent days in which Mrs Clinton has accused her opponent’s campaign of distorting her views on trade and health policy. She said that some of Mr Obama’s tactics “have been disturbing” and added: “I think it’s important that you stand up for yourself.”

Mr Obama accepted his rival’s word that she had not authorised the distribution of a photograph showing him dressed in a turban and tribal costume which a gossip website had claimed was being circulated by her staff. “That is something we can set aside,” he said.

But Mr Obama went on to suggest Mrs Clinton’s complaints smacked of double standards. She has “constantly sent out negative attacks on us,” he said, “and we haven’t whined about it, because I understand that’s the nature of this campaign.”

They spent 16 minutes criticising each other’s health policy, with Mrs Clinton saying Mr Obama would leave millions of Americans without cover – a claim he rejected as inaccurate.

The two candidates also traded jabs over trade policy and the Nafta deal signed by Bill Clinton which is now blamed for the loss of thousands of jobs in Ohio’s manufacturing industry. Mrs Clinton said she had always had her reservations about it and promised to “opt out of Nafta” unless it could be re-negotiated with Mexico and Canada. Mr Obama said his rival had been inconsistent about the issue but agreed with her latest position.

Mrs Clinton said her experience in foreign policy made her best-placed to take on John McCain in November’s general election against the presumptive Republican nominee. “I will have a much better case to make on a range of the issues that, really, America must confront going forward and will be able to hold my own and make the case for a change in policy that will be better for our country,” she said.

Mr Obama responded by highlighting once more her vote in 2002 authorising military action in Iraq.

“Senator Clinton often says that she is ready on Day 1, but in fact she was ready to give in to George Bush on Day 1 on this critical issue.

“So the same person that she criticises for having terrible judgment — and we can’t afford to have another one of those — in fact she facilitated and enabled this individual to make a decision that has been strategically damaging to the United States of America.” Mrs Clinton later said she wished she could have that vote back.

Mr Obama was more uncomfortable with questions about his previous promises to sign up for strictly-limited public funding in the general election when Mr Obama is tempted to stick with private money after building up a million-strong database of donors.

“If I am the nominee I will sit down with John McCain and make sure we come up with a system that is fair to both sides,” he said, twice refusing to repeat his earlier pledge.

Mrs Clinton, asked a similarly tough question about whether she would release tax returns for the multi-million dollar fortune amassed by her and her husband, said she would do so soon, but that “I’m a little busy right now.”

She then tried to hit Mr Obama over his endorsement from Louis Farrakhan, the Chicago-based Nation of Islam leader who has made numerous anti-Semitic comments. Although Mr Obama said he had denounced remarks from a man he called “Minister Farrakhan”, Mrs Clinton said her opponent should have explicitly refused such support. “There’s a difference between denouncing and rejecting,” she said, “I just think we’ve got to be even stronger.”

Mr Obama diffused what might have been an explosive moment by saying, to laughter, that he could see any such distinction before adding: “I happily concede the point – I would reject and denounce.”

At the end of the debate, he once again sought to dismiss any impression of a significant gulf between them, saying the former First Lady would be a worthy presidential nominee. “Senator Clinton has campaigned magnificently. She is an absolutely outstanding public servant and I’me very proud to have campaigned with her,” he said with a gracious smile, even though “I think I would be better.”

David Axelrod, his chief strategist, said afterwards: “There were a lot of jabs thrown tonight – they were glancing blows.”

Mrs Clinton’s strategist, Mark Penn, said she had demonstrated “strength and passion” even though “Senator Obama always wants to have the last word”. Asked what she would do if she lost Texas and Ohio, he replied: “We’re looking to be successful in these states. We’re in this all the way.”

via//The Times

Automated killer robots ‘threat to humanity’: expert

Increasingly autonomous, gun-toting robots developed for warfare could easily fall into the hands of terrorists and may one day unleash a robot arms race, a top expert on artificial intelligence told AFP.”They pose a threat to humanity,” said University of Sheffield professor Noel Sharkey ahead of a keynote address Wednesday before Britain’s Royal United Services Institute.

Intelligent machines deployed on battlefields around the world — from mobile grenade launchers to rocket-firing drones — can already identify and lock onto targets without human help.

There are more than 4,000 US military robots on the ground in Iraq, as well as unmanned aircraft that have clocked hundreds of thousands of flight hours.

The first three armed combat robots fitted with large-caliber machine guns deployed to Iraq last summer, manufactured by US arms maker Foster-Miller, proved so successful that 80 more are on order, said Sharkey.

But up to now, a human hand has always been required to push the button or pull the trigger.

It we are not careful, he said, that could change.

Military leaders “are quite clear that they want autonomous robots as soon as possible, because they are more cost-effective and give a risk-free war,” he said.

Several countries, led by the United States, have already invested heavily in robot warriors developed for use on the battlefield.

South Korea and Israel both deploy armed robot border guards, while China, India, Russia and Britain have all increased the use of military robots.

Washington plans to spend four billion dollars by 2010 on unmanned technology systems, with total spending expected rise to 24 billion, according to the Department of Defense’s Unmanned Systems Roadmap 2007-2032, released in December.

James Canton, an expert on technology innovation and CEO of the Institute for Global Futures, predicts that deployment within a decade of detachments that will include 150 soldiers and 2,000 robots.

The use of such devices by terrorists should be a serious concern, said Sharkey.

Captured robots would not be difficult to reverse engineer, and could easily replace suicide bombers as the weapon-of-choice. “I don’t know why that has not happened already,” he said.

But even more worrisome, he continued, is the subtle progression from the semi-autonomous military robots deployed today to fully independent killing machines.

“I have worked in artificial intelligence for decades, and the idea of a robot making decisions about human termination terrifies me,” Sharkey said.

Ronald Arkin of Georgia Institute of Technology, who has worked closely with the US military on robotics, agrees that the shift towards autonomy will be gradual.

But he is not convinced that robots don’t have a place on the front line.

“Robotics systems may have the potential to out-perform humans from a perspective of the laws of war and the rules of engagement,” he told a conference on technology in warfare at Stanford University last month.

The sensors of intelligent machines, he argued, may ultimately be better equipped to understand an environment and to process information. “And there are no emotions that can cloud judgement, such as anger,” he added.

Nor is there any inherent right to self-defence.

For now, however, there remain several barriers to the creation and deployment of Terminator-like killing machines.

Some are technical. Teaching a computer-driven machine — even an intelligent one — how to distinguish between civilians and combatants, or how to gauge a proportional response as mandated by the Geneva Conventions, is simply beyond the reach of artificial intelligence today.

But even if technical barriers are overcome, the prospect of armies increasingly dependent on remotely-controlled or autonomous robots raises a host of ethical issues that have barely been addressed.

Arkin points out that the US Department of Defense’s 230 billion dollar Future Combat Systems programme — the largest military contract in US history — provides for three classes of aerial and three land-based robotics systems.

“But nowhere is there any consideration of the ethical implications of the weaponisation of these systems,” he said.

For Sharkey, the best solution may be an outright ban on autonomous weapons systems. “We have to say where we want to draw the line and what we want to do — and then get an international agreement,” he said.

Video of Army’s ‘crusher’ robot at this link

via//The Raw Story

Debunking the Hemp Conspiracy Theory

Pot isn’t illegal because the paper industry is afraid of competing with hemp — it’s because of racism and the culture wars.

Scratch a pothead and ask them why marijuana is outlawed, and there’s a good chance you’ll get some version of the “hemp conspiracy” theory. Federal pot prohibition, the story goes, resulted from a plot by the Hearst and DuPont business empires to squelch hemp as a possible competitor to wood-pulp paper and nylon. These allegations can be found anywhere from Wikipedia entries on William Randolph Hearst and the DuPont Company to comments on pot-related articles published here on AlterNet. And these allegations are virtually unchallenged; many people fervently believe in the hemp conspiracy, even though the evidence to back it up vaporizes under even minimal scrutiny.

You could make a stronger case for Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin of John F. Kennedy; Oswald at least left a not-quite-smoking gun at the scene.

Pot activist Jack Herer’s book The Emperor Wears No Clothes is the prime source for the hemp-conspiracy theory. It alleges that in the mid-1930s, “when the new mechanical hemp fiber stripping machines to conserve hemp’s high-cellulose pulp finally became state of the art, available and affordable,” Hearst, with enormous holdings in timber acreage and investments in paper manufacturing, “stood to lose billions of dollars and perhaps go bankrupt.” Meanwhile, DuPont in 1937 had just patented nylon and “a new sulfate/sulfite process for making paper from wood pulp” — so “if hemp had not been made illegal, 80 percent of DuPont’s business would never have materialized.”

Herer, a somewhat cantankerous former marijuana-pipe salesman, deserves a lot of credit for his cannabis activism. He was a dedicated grass-roots agitator for pot legalization during the late 1980s, perhaps the most herb-hostile time in recent history. Despite a substantial stroke in 2001, he soldiers on; he’s currently campaigning to get a cannabis-legalization initiative on the ballot in Santa Barbara, California. The Emperor — an omnivorous conglomeration of newspaper clippings and historical documents about hemp and marijuana, held together by Herer’s cannabis evangelism and fiery screeds against prohibition — has been a bible for many pot activists. Unearthing a 1916 Department of Agriculture bulletin about hemp paper and a World War II short film that exhorted American farmers to grow “Hemp for Victory,” Herer more than anyone else revived the idea that the cannabis plant was useful for purposes besides getting high. Unfortunately, he’s completely wrong on this particular issue. The evidence for a “hemp conspiracy” just doesn’t stand up. It is far more likely that marijuana was outlawed because of racism and cultural warfare.

How marijuana was prohibited

Twentieth-century cannabis prohibition first reared its head in countries where white minorities ruled black majorities: South Africa, where it’s known as dagga, banned it in 1911, and Jamaica, then a British colony, outlawed ganja in 1913. They were followed by Canada, Britain and New Zealand, which added cannabis to their lists of illegal narcotics in the 1920s. Canada’s pot law was enacted in 1923, several years before there were any reports of people actually smoking it there. It was largely the brainchild of Emily F. Murphy, a feminist but racist judge who wrote anti-Asian, anti-marijuana rants under the pseudonym “Janey Canuck.”

In the United States, marijuana prohibition began partly as a throw-in on laws restricting opiates and cocaine to prescription-only use, and partly in Southern and Western states and cities where blacks and Mexican immigrants were smoking it. Missouri outlawed opium and hashish dens in 1889, but did not actually prohibit cannabis until 1935. Massachusetts began restricting cannabis in its 1911 pharmacy law, and three other New England states followed in the next seven years.

California’s 1913 narcotics law banned possession of cannabis preparations — which California NORML head Dale Gieringer believes was a legal error, that the provision was intended to parallel those affecting opium, morphine and cocaine. The law was amended in 1915 to ban the sale of cannabis without a prescription. “Thus hemp pharmaceuticals remained technically legal to sell, but not possess, on prescription!” Gieringer wrote in The Origins of Cannabis Prohibition in California. “There are no grounds to believe that this prohibition was ever enforced, as hemp drugs continued to be prescribed in California for years to come.” In 1928, the state began requiring hemp farmers to notify law enforcement about their crops.

New York City made cannabis prescription-only in 1914, part to pre-empt users of over-the-counter opium, morphine and cocaine medicines from switching to cannabis preparations, but with allusions to hashish use by Middle Eastern immigrants. In the West and Southwest, anti-Mexican sentiment quickly came into play. California’s first marijuana arrests came in a Mexican neighborhood in Los Angeles in 1914, according to Gieringer, and the Los Angeles Times said “sinister legends of murder, suicide and disaster” surrounded the drug. The city of El Paso, Texas, outlawed reefer in 1915, two years after a Mexican thug, “allegedly crazed by habitual marijuana use,” killed a cop. By the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933, 30 states had some form of pot law.

The campaign against cannabis heated up after Repeal. “I wish I could show you what a small marihuana cigaret can do to one of our degenerate Spanish-speaking residents,” a Colorado newspaper editor wrote in 1936. “The fatal marihuana cigarette must be recognized as a DEADLY DRUG, and American children must be PROTECTED AGAINST IT,” the Hearst newspapers editorialized.

Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, headed the charge. “If the hideous monster Frankenstein came face to face with the monster marihuana, he would drop dead of fright,” he thundered in 1937.

An ambitious racist (a 1934 memo described an informant as a “ginger-colored nigger”) who had previously been federal assistant Prohibition commissioner, Anslinger railed against reefer in magazine articles like 1937’s “Marihuana: Assassin of Youth.” It featured gory stories like that of Victor Licata, a once “sane, rather quiet young man” from Tampa, Fla., who’d killed his family with an axe in 1933, after becoming “pitifully crazed” from smoking “muggles.” (Actually, the Tampa police had tried to have Licata committed to a mental hospital before he started smoking pot.)

Anslinger’s other theme was that white girls would be ruined once they’d experienced the lurid pleasures of having a black man’s joint in their mouth. “Colored students at the Univ. of Minn. partying with female students (white) smoking and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution,” he noted. “Result, pregnancy.”

In 1937, after a very cursory debate, Congress enacted the Marihuana Tax Act, levying a prohibitive $100-an-ounce tax on cannabis. “I believe in some cases one cigarette might develop a homicidal mania,” Anslinger testified in a hearing on the bill.

The case against the “hemp conspiracy”

The hemp-conspiracy theory blames that law on Hearst and DuPont’s plot to suppress hemp paper and cloth. The theory is that the invention of a hemp processor known as the “decorticator” made it easier, faster and much more cost-effective to extract hemp fiber from the stalks. In February 1938, Popular Mechanics hailed hemp as the “New Billion Dollar Crop.” In response, Hearst and DuPont, scared by the prospect of hemp’s resurrection as a competitor for their products, schemed to eliminate the plant.

However, The Emperor makes only three specific claims to support that theory. One is the anti-marijuana propagandizing of the Hearst newspapers. Second, it claims that Anslinger’s anti-pot crusade was on behalf of Pittsburgh banker Andrew Mellon, who supposedly was DuPont’s “chief financial backer,” lending the company the funds it needed to purchase General Motors in the 1920s. And finally, The Emperor argues that DuPont anticipated the Marihuana Tax Act in its 1937 annual report, which worried that the company’s future was “clouded with uncertainties” — specifically about “the extent to which the revenue-raising power of government may be converted into an instrument for forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization.”

None of these claims stand up.

Claim 1: Hearst the propagandist

According to W.A. Swanberg’s extensive biography Citizen Hearst, the Hearst chain was actually the nation’s largest purchaser of newsprint — and when the price rose from $40 a ton to over $50 in the late 1930s, he fell so deep in debt to Canadian paper producers and banks that he had to sell his prized art collection to avert foreclosure. “It therefore seems that it would have been in Hearst’s interest to promote cheap hemp paper substitutes, had that been a viable alternative,” Dale Gieringer wrote in his article, calling the hemp-conspiracy theory “fanciful” and a “myth.”

In any case, the Hearst papers never needed hidden self-interest to trumpet fiendish menaces. The expression “yellow journalism” comes from Hearst’s campaign for a war against Spain in 1898. And from the 1930s on, his papers were finding RED SUBVERSIVES and PINKO FELLOW-TRAVELERS under every bed. In 1935, a University of Chicago professor accused of being a Communist by the Hearst-owned Herald-Examiner told the Nation that the reporter covering him had admitted, “We do just what the Old Man orders. One week he orders a campaign against rats. The next week he orders a campaign against dope peddlers. Pretty soon he’s going to campaign against college professors. It’s all the bunk, but orders are orders.”

Claim 2: The Anslinger-DuPont Connection

There was an Anslinger-Mellon connection. Anslinger was appointed to head the Bureau of Narcotics by Andrew Mellon, his wife’s uncle, who was treasury secretary in the Herbert Hoover administration. However, it’s unlikely that DuPont needed to borrow money to buy GM in the 1920s, as the company had done very well as the leading manufacturer of explosives for the Allied forces during World War I.

Historians find no evidence of a DuPont-Mellon connection either. “General Motors was historically associated with the Morgan group during that period,” Mark Mizruchi, a professor of sociology and business administration at the University of Michigan, told me in an email interview in 2003. Sociologist G. William Domhoff of the University of California at Santa Cruz, author of Who Rules America?, concurred, saying it was safe to state there was no connection. And in the 440-page tome considered the definitive account of American banking and corporate finance during the Depression era, Mizruchi added, Japanese historian Tian Kang Go does not mention “even the smallest financial connection between DuPont and Mellon.”

Claim 3: Dubious DuPont claims

The argument that DuPont’s 1937 complaint about federal taxes had anything to do with hemp is an extremely dubious stretch. If the company had been talking about the government eliminating a competitor by levying a prohibitive tax, it wouldn’t have been worrying about the uncertainty of foreseeing new federal imposts. It would have been celebrating its newly cleared path. Given the context of the times, it’s almost certain that this statement was merely typical 1930s corporate-class whining about the New Deal’s social programs and business regulations — akin to current corporate-class complaints about government “social engineering.”

Prohibition’s racist history

The belief that marijuana prohibition came about because of the secret machinations of an economic cabal ignores the pattern of every drug-law crusade in American history. From the 19th-century campaigns against opium and alcohol to the crack panic of the 1980s, they have all been fueled by racism and cultural war, conflated with fear of crime and occasionally abetted by well-intentioned reform impulses. (The financial self-interest of the prison-industrial complex has been a more recent development.) The first drug-prohibition laws in the United States were opium bans aimed at Chinese immigrants. San Francisco outlawed opium in 1875, and the state of California followed six years later. In 1886, an Oregon judge ruled that the state’s opium prohibition was constitutional even if it proceeded “more from a desire to vex and annoy the ‘Heathen Chinee’… than to protect the people from the evil habit,” notes Doris Marie Provine in Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs. In How the Other Half Lives, journalist Jacob Riis wrote of opium-addicted white prostitutes seduced by the “cruel cunning” of Chinese men.

The path to the 1914 federal narcotics law that limited cocaine and opioids to medical use — and was almost immediately interpreted as prescribing narcotics to addicts — was more complex. The main rationale was ending the over-the-counter sale of patent medicines such as heroin cough syrup, but there was a definite racist streak among advocates for controlling cocaine. “Cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the Negroes,” Hamilton Wright, the hard-drinking doctor-turned-diplomat who spearheaded the first major multinational drug-control agreements, told Congress. In 1914, Dr. Edward Huntington Williams opined in the New York Times Magazine that “once the negro has formed the habit, he is irreclaimable. The only method to keep him from taking the drug is by imprisoning him.”

The movement to prohibit alcohol was part puritanical, part racist. In the big cities, it was anti-immigrant. Bishop James Cannon of the Anti-Saloon League in 1928 denounced Italians, Poles and Russian Jews as “the kind of dirty people that you find today on the sidewalks of New York,” while in 1923, Imogen Oakley of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs described the Irish, Germans, and others as “insoluble lumps of unassimilated and unassimilable peoples … ‘wet’ by heredity and habit.” In the South, it was anti-black. “The disenfranchisement of Negroes is the heart of the movement in Georgia and throughout the South for the Prohibition of the liquor traffic,” Georgia prohibitionist A.J. McKelway wrote in 1907. “Liquor will actually make a brute out of a negro, causing him to commit unnatural crimes,” Alabama Rep. Richmond P. Hobson told Congress in 1914, a year after he’d sponsored the first federal Prohibition bill. (He said it had the same effect on white men, but took longer because they were “further evolved.”)

Prohibitionism was an early example of fundamentalist Christians’ political strength. The midpoint of William Jennings Bryan’s odyssey from the prairie populist of 1896 to the evolution foe of 1925 was his endorsement of Prohibition in 1910. The rural puritans were abetted by middle-class do-gooders who, when they saw a slum-dwelling factory hand come home drunk and beat his wife, would blame the saloon instead of the pressures of capitalist exploitation or the license of misogyny. And many industrial employers, including DuPont’s gunpowder division, demanded abstinent workers. World War I’s austerity was the final piece of the puzzle.

Prohibitionists played key roles in the campaign to outlaw cannabis. Harry Anslinger had been so hardline that he advocated prosecuting individual users for possession of alcohol. (Federal Prohibition, unlike the current marijuana laws, only banned sales, allowed personal possession and limited home brewing, and had an exemption for medical use.) Richmond P. Hobson, who crusaded against drugs in the 1920s as head of the World Narcotic Defense Association, was an early advocate of marijuana prohibition. In 1931, he told the federal Wickersham Commission that marijuana used in excess “motivates the most atrocious acts.” And in early 1936, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs joined Anslinger’s campaign to make reefers verboten.

In a country that was puritanical and racist enough in 1919 to outlaw alcohol in 1919, forbidding cannabis was politically very easy. Alcohol had been the most pervasive recreational drug in the Western world for millennia. Marijuana was virtually unknown. And though Prohibitionists — like the immigration laws of the 1920s, the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, and the 1928 presidential campaign against Irish Catholic Democrat Al Smith — demonized whiskey-sodden Micks, wine-soaked wops, traitorous beer-swilling Krauts and liquor-selling Jew shopkeepers, at least those people were sort of white. Marijuana was used mainly by Mexican immigrants and African-Americans.

The Nixon-era escalation of the war on drugs was one of the few times in U.S. history when white users were a prime target, as marijuana and LSD provided legal pretexts to attack the ’60s counterculture. Richard Nixon’s White House tapes captured him in 1971 growling that “every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish.” But Nixon and other law-and-order politicians were most successful when they lumped youthful cultural-political rebellion and black militance with ghetto heroin addiction and the rising crime of the 1970s. New York’s draconian Rockefeller drug laws, passed in 1973 as Gov. Nelson Rockefeller was trying to look “tough on crime,” were a harbinger of the federal mandatory minimums of the 1980s. The result was that more than 90 percent of the state’s drug prisoners are black or Latino.

The crack hysteria of the late 1980s was another example of the fear of dark-skinned demons breeding racially repressive law enforcement. Both federal and many state crack laws were designed to snare street dealers and bottom-level distributors, giving them the same penalties as powder-cocaine wholesalers. The racial results were obvious almost immediately. In overwhelmingly white Minnesota, more than 90 percent of the people convicted of possession of crack in 1988-89 were black. In the early 1990s, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Southern California went more than five years without prosecuting a white person for crack.

That pattern still holds: In 2003, 81 percent of the defendants sentenced on crack charges nationwide were black. And law enforcement didn’t spare the African-American innocent. In an August 1988 drug raid on an apartment block on Dalton Avenue in South Central Los Angeles, 88 city cops smashed walls and furniture with sledgehammers and axes, beat people with flashlights, and poured bleach on residents’ clothes — and arrested two teenagers who didn’t live there on minor drug charges.

Why do people believe it?

Why, then, do so many people believe in the “hemp conspiracy”? First, it’s the influence of The Emperor Wears No Clothes; many people inspired to cannabis activism by Jack Herer’s hemp-can-save-the-world vision and passionate denunciations of pot prohibition buy into the whole “conspiracy against marijuana” package. Another is that many stoners love a good conspiracy theory; secret cabals are simpler and sexier villains than sociopolitical forces. The conspiracist worldview, a hybrid of the who-really-killed-the-Kennedys suspicions of the ’60s left and the Bilderbergs-and-Illuminati demonology of the far right, is especially common in rural areas and among pothead Ron Paul supporters. Most people don’t have the historical or political knowledge to dispute a conspiracist flood of detailed half-truths.

Counterculture people who see the evil done by corporations and politicians are often quick to believe that they are thus guilty of anything and everything — that because the CIA tried to kill Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar, it’s therefore indisputable that it killed Bob Marley by giving him boots booby-trapped with a carcinogen-tipped wire. Witness the multitudes who zealously argue that because George W. Bush gained a political advantage from the 9/11 attacks and told a thousand lies to justify the war in Iraq, it’s proof that his operatives planted explosives in the World Trade Center and set them off an hour or so after the planes hit.

The Bush administration’s attempt to link buying herb to “supporting terrorism” proved more laughable than lasting. Yet the racism-culture war combination is still very potent. Among the 360,000 arrests for marijuana possession in New York City between 1997 and 2006, the decade when mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg turned the city into the nation’s pot-bust capital, 84 percent of the people popped were black or Latino, mostly young men. And the oft-cited statistic that there are more black men in prison than in college should be the equivalent of a doctor’s warning that the nation has a cholesterol level approaching Jerry Garcia’s after years on a diet of ice cream, cigarettes and heroin.

Steven Wishnia is the author of “Exit 25 Utopia,” “The Cannabis Companion” and “Invincible Coney Island.” He lives in New York.

via//AlterNet

The name game and Obama

McCain disowns radio host’s anti-Obama rant

Bill Cunningham, a conservative radio talk show host based in Cincinnati, won a National Assn. of Broadcasters Marconi Award in 2001. Today, he staked his claim for a different “honor” — cheap shot artist of the year — with his repeated and pointed references to “Barack Hussein Obama” as he helped emcee a rally in his hometown for John McCain. As Times reporter Maeve Reston relates here, McCain, to his credit, quickly repudiated the type of “help” Cunningham was providing. Referring to the incessant use of Obama’s middle name, the presumed Republican presidential nominee said, “It will never happen again. It will never happen again.”

That comment earned a rapid note of thanks from Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton. “It is a sign that if there is a McCain-Obama general election, it can be intensely competitive but the candidates will attempt to keep it respectful and focused on issues,” Burton said.

Despite McCain’s pledge, though, the type of message Cunningham sought to send today almost assuredly will happen again. Perhaps not at an officially sanctioned …

… McCain event, but surreptitiously, in the technological age’s equivalent of a nasty whispering campaign. And as Canadian journalist Sheldon Alberts reminds us in this post, Cunningham is hardly the first to play the Obama middle-name card in the mainstream. Other culprits include Rush Limbaugh (no surprise there) and Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia (in recent comments on Bill Maher’s talk show).This is, after all, the second straight day in which attention has been called to distinctive elements of Obama’s background. The contretemps over the photo posted on the Drudge Report of Obama wearing native garb during a trip to Kenya arose precisely from the fact that, unlike with anyone who has ever come this close to the American presidency, his heritage is partly African.Similarly, his name is unusual in the annals of prospective presidents — Van Buren, Roosevelt and Eisenhower are about as exotic as it gets for White House occupants to date.So if Obama succeeds in nailing down the Democratic presidential nomination, be prepared for more attempts — some subtle, some not so — to tap into simple, blatant prejudices to attempt to derail him. And the test as to whether America has progressed as far as many hope it has also would seem to be fairly simple — the degree to which these efforts succeed.

via//Los Angeles Times

Survey: US Religious Landscape in Flux

The U.S. religious marketplace is extremely volatile, with nearly half of American adults leaving the faith tradition of their upbringing to either switch allegiances or abandon religious affiliation altogether, a new survey finds.

The study released Monday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life is unusual for it sheer scope, relying on interviews with more than 35,000 adults to document a diverse and dynamic U.S. religious population.

While much of the study confirms earlier findings — mainline Protestant churches are in decline, non-denominational churches are gaining and the ranks of the unaffiliated are growing — it also provides a deeper look behind those trends, and of smaller religious groups.

“The American religious economy is like a marketplace — very dynamic, very competitive,” said Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum. “Everyone is losing, everyone is gaining. There are net winners and losers, but no one can stand still. Those groups that are losing significant numbers have to recoup them to stay vibrant.”

The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey estimates the United States is 78 percent Christian and about to lose its status as a majority Protestant nation, at 51 percent and slipping.

More than one-quarter of American adults have left the faith of their childhood for another religion or no religion at all, the survey found. Factoring in moves from one stream or denomination of Protestantism to another, the number rises to 44 percent.

One in four adults ages 18 to 29 claim no affiliation with a religious institution.

“In the past, certain religions had a real holding power, where people from one generation to the next would stay,” said Penn State University sociologist Roger Finke, who consulted in the survey planning. “Right now, there is a dropping confidence in organized religion, especially in the traditional religious forms.”

Lugo said the 44 percent figure is “a very conservative estimate,” and more research is planned to determine the causes.

“It does seem in keeping with the high tolerance among Americans for change,” Lugo said. “People move a lot, people change jobs a lot. It’s a very fluid society.”

The religious demographic benefiting the most from this religious churn is those who claim no religious affiliation. People moving into that category outnumber those moving out of it by a three-to-one margin.

The majority of the unaffiliated — 12 percent of the overall population — describe their religion as “nothing in particular,” and about half of those say faith is at least somewhat important to them. Atheists or agnostics account for 4 percent of the total population.

The Roman Catholic Church has lost more members than any faith tradition because of affiliation swapping, the survey found. While nearly one in three Americans were raised Catholic, fewer than one in four say they’re Catholic today. That means roughly 10 percent of all Americans are ex-Catholics.

The share of the population that identifies as Catholic, however, has remained fairly stable in recent decades thanks to an influx of immigrant Catholics, mostly from Latin America. Nearly half of all Catholics under 30 are Hispanic, the survey found.

On the Protestant side, changes in affiliation are swelling the ranks of nondenominational churches, while Baptist and Methodist traditions are showing net losses.

Many Americans have vague denominational ties at best. People who call themselves “just a Protestant,” in fact, account for nearly 10 percent of all Protestants.

Although evangelical churches strive to win new Christian believers from the “unchurched,” the survey found most converts to evangelical churches were raised Protestant.

Hindus claimed the highest retention of childhood members, at 84 percent. The group with the worst retention is one of the fastest growing — Jehovah’s Witnesses. Only 37 percent of those raised in the sect known for door-to-door proselytizing said they remain members.

Among other findings involving smaller religious groups, more than half of American Buddhists surveyed were white, and most Buddhists were converts.

More people in the survey pool identified themselves as Buddhist than Muslim, although both populations were small — less than 1 percent of the total population. By contrast, Jews accounted for 1.7 percent of the overall population.

The self-identified Buddhists — 0.7 percent of those surveyed — illustrate a core challenge to estimating religious affiliation: What does affiliation mean?

It’s unclear whether people who called themselves Buddhists did so because they practice yoga or meditation, for instance, or claim affiliation with a Buddhist institution.

The report does not project membership figures for religious groups, in part because the survey is not as authoritative as a census and didn’t count children, Lugo said. The U.S. Census does not ask questions on religion.

On the Web: U.S. Relgious Landscape Survey

via//AP