In a piece entitled The Misunderestimated Mr. Cheney:
John Dean" said:
"It has long been apparent that Cheney's genius is that he lets George W. Bush get out of bed every morning actually believing he is the President."
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Dick Cheney says that he is not part of the executive branch of the government and thus not subject to its rules. Hell, I can understand that. The puppeteer holds the strings, he doesn't have any strings attached to him.
But if he's not part of the White House, taxpayers shouldn't pay his way, Rep.Rahm Emanuel says and proposes cutting him off. An excellent idea.
Not that this gutless Congress will actually do anything beyond posturing and speechmaking, the same thing they have been doing since Cheney and his gang stole the White House and our republic.
Readers Digest had an article entitled "World's Most Dangerous Leaders."
I scanned the pictures accompanying the piece but George Bush wasn't there.
As the article was, at best, incomplete, I didn't bother to read it.
For months I resisted my managing editor's demands that I produce a daily 'People' column for the Miami News.
I pointed out that they inevitably became a listing of the meaningless antics of celebrities, and I reminded him of one of the paper's finest hours. It happened before I had come there, but I still remembered admiring their handling of a story of international importance, a story that was getting reams of attention.
At the bottom of the front page the Miami News always ran a 'bright', a pithy account of a funny, whimsical or witty news story of no significance.
On Nov 10, 1975, the daily bright said:
"Liz Taylor and Richard Burton were married again today in Africa."
It was a long time ago and I'm paraphrasing, but essentially that was it, that was all the Miami News carried.
If only today's media would treat Paris Hilton that way.
My boss might have suggested that I use the People column the same way, he didn't. One day he simply told me that if there wasn't one in the next edition, I was fired. There was.
I keep getting tirades about the "immigrant problem" and demanding that I do something about it right now.
Well, I do have a solution. Everybody who is an immigrant, or whose father, grandfather or great-grandfather was an immigrant, should leave the country right now.
I'm sure that the folks from the Abenaki, Algonquian, Arapaho, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Cree, Sioiux, Kickapoo, Pequots, Montauks, Narragansetts, Niantics, Nipmucs, Shinnecocks, Narragansett, Ojibway, Shawnee, Apaches, Cherokees, Navahos, etc. tribes will be glad to see us all go.
For a nation of immigrants to get all hot and bothered about the latest wave of immigrants is a bit silly, particularly when it is one result of the devastating effects of NAFTA, which is hurting workers of America and Mexico.
Arlene asks, "If we need to cut down on our oil subsistence, and biofuels are out, what should we do?"
A fair question.
When you're in a hole, first thing you need to do is stop digging. We are literally at war over oil because we're using far more than we can supply ourselves from our own territories. The first thing we need to do, therefore, is to stop using so damn much oil.
And the best way to accomplish that is to start using it more wisely, that is conservation.
Conservation is a dirty word in America. We are Americans, dammit, and we will use what we want to use. So bring on the SUVs and other gas guzzling vehicles, air-conditioners set to frigid in the summer and heaters set to tropical in the winter, food shipped thousands of miles out of season, weekend flying vacations to hither and yon. We refuse to use buses, trains, or carpooling; it's beneath us. So what if it saves fuel, we don't care about that. We can always start a war and steal some other countries oil.
One other thing, decades ago, municipalities should have begun demanding that all new homes be equipped with solar heating, in some cases solar electric. That alone would save hundreds of billions of gallons of oil. Of course, if municipalities won't demand it, we could always do it ourselves. If we cared.
There is another point to address — we use a lot of oil to create biofuel.
"There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel," says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. "These strategies are not sustainable."
In a study he did with an another professor, he found that:
* Corn requires 29% more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
* Wood biomass requires 57% more fossil energy than the fuel produced.
And sunflowers require 118% more fossil energy than the fuel produced.
The researchers considered such factors as the energy used in producing the crop (including production of pesticides and fertilizer, running farm machinery and irrigating, grinding and transporting the crop) and in fermenting/distilling the ethanol from the water mix.
The costs associated with environmental pollution weren't considered.
The idea of turning food into fuel to feed our SUVs while hundreds of millions around the world of people go hungry or even starve is utterly obscene.
"Biofuels" is the clever name for this ethical and ecological disaster which is treated as the answer to the rising costs and increasing scarcity of oil by cynical politicians and the their lackeys in the corporate media.
There is one sane voice speaking out, though your chances of hearing about it in the mainstream media are about as likely as Bush really embracing the teachings of Christ.
A UN official, Jean Ziegler, said yesterday that diverting sugar and maize for biofuels could lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths from hunger worldwide. He cited a couple of examples of the growing problem — more and more sugar cane plantations in Brazil are being used for biofuels, leaving less land for subsistence farmers, and in Mexico, the price of maize is climbing because of rising demand for use in biofuels. The examples he cited were just the tip of the iceberg.
The whole idea is a dangerous joke that diverts attention from the ecological and humanitarian horror that awaits us.
Christina M. Smith has an excellent piece at CommonDreams.org about the use of framing questions to slant the presidential debates. She gives an example of Wolf Blitzer using a conservative frame in a question to Barack Obama. In this case, the framing didn't work.
"BLITZER: I want you to raise your hand if you believe English should be the official language of the United States.
"OBAMA: This is the kind of question that is designed precisely to divide us. ... The issue is not whether or not future generations of immigrants are going to learn English. The question is: How can we come up with both a legal, sensible immigration policy?"
But far too often the framing works to steer the "debate" into predetermined paths.
Nearly 2 years ago, I tackled the same thing in a piece entitled "Words, Words, Words" for Swans, an online magazine. In it, I said:
"...words are the most important thing in the public's perception of politics and everything else that is important. Whoever chooses the language frames the debate.
"Let's start with the most basic political division -- conservative versus liberal. When did liberal become a four-letter word? When I was a youth, a liberal was as proud of his heritage as a conservative was of his. (but) liberals became timid and defensive and eventually began running from the label. And yet, if you don't use the word liberal, most Americans support the liberal position on a host of things -- public education, progressive taxation, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, environmental protection, civil rights for minorities, the United Nations, and the observance of international law.
"...If you call it "welfare reform," you can pretty well destroy the system. Critics are reduced to sputtering that perhaps the reform went too far, instead of pointing out that calling it "reform" is a grotesque lie. If progressives could choose the language and make it stick we could "reform" the War Department -- euphemistically called the Defense Department -- to half its present size and save trillions of dollars."
If you want to read to the whole article on Swans, go to
http://www.swans.com/library/art11/rdeck050.h
It is a truism that politicians, and least national politicians, are lying hypocritical bastards. So, I suppose, we shouldn't be surprised at the bullshit coming out of nearly all the presidential candidates. Nevertheless, it is more than I can stomach.
Take Iraq, for instance.
Most of the Republican candidates love the war. They won't fight it, of course; neither will their children, grandchildren, or any of their friends. But they love it, as long as their inferiors do the killing and dying.
The Democrats are trying to take a more nuanced approach. Most of them are against the war, sort of. Oh, most of them voted for it, but they were misinformed, you see. And anyway, we can't get out now! Why there would be slaughter! And, of course, the Iraqis would still control their own oil and what would poor Exxon do?
But about that vote they cast in favor of the war. It wasn't their fault. They were misinformed, they were lied to, who could have known?
Forget that the lies for going to war were transparent. The dimmest politician knew that the "moral" basis for attacking Iraq was the "right" of "preemptive war" – i.e. to bomb, burn, slaughter, to destroy anyone or anything we want to just because we can.
That is the morality of madmen or monsters — or US presidential candidates.