Tag: Opinion

The body bag marked “Victim 0001” on Sept. 11, 2001, contained the corpse of Father Mychal Judge, a Catholic chaplain with the Fire Department of New York. When he heard about the disaster at the World Trade Center, he donned his Catholic collar and firefighter garb and raced downtown. He saw people jump to their deaths to avoid the inferno more than 1,000 feet above. At 9:59 a.m., the South Tower collapsed, and the force and debris from that mass of steel, concrete, glass and humanity as it hit the ground is likely what killed Father Mychal. His was the first recorded death from the attacks that morning. His life’s work should be central to the 10th anniversary commemorations of the Sept. 11 attacks: peace, tolerance and reconciliation.

Phyllis Bennis: Headlines or Not, the Iraq War is Not Over

It might seem like cause for celebration after reading the New York Times headline, “Iraq War Marks First Month with No U.S. Military Deaths].” But the smaller print on the page reminds us why celebrating is not really in order: “Many Iraqis are killed…” The cost of this war is still way too high – in Iraqi lives and in our money.

With so much attention and so many billions of our tax dollars shifting from Iraq to the devastating and ever more costly war in Afghanistan, it is too easy to forget that there are still almost 50,000 U.S. troops occupying Iraq. We are still paying almost $50 billion just this year for the war in Iraq. And while we don’t hear about it very often, many Iraqis are still being killed.

The Associated Press has been doing some good investigative reporting lately. On August 24, the AP broke the news that the CIA and the NYPD are combining forces to spy on Muslims in New York City. Since the CIA is prohibited by law to collect intelligence on American citizens, this is more than newsworthy. It’s probably unconstitutional, which explains why the NYPD has, according to the report, kept these activities secret.

This is no ordinary program, nor does it seem to be merely about sharing expertise.

According to the report, the NYPD dispatches “rakers,” the NYPD term, into a “human mapping program” to monitor the daily lives of Muslim Americans in the places where ordinary living transpires, such as bookstores, cafés, bars, and nightclubs, without the hint of criminal wrongdoing. The police department also employs “mosque crawlers,” who scrutinize imams and their sermons, and have gathered intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs commonly associated with Muslim workers.

David K. Shipler: Our Vanished Civil  Liberties http://www.thenation.com/artic…

Caricatures created by politics never fit comfortably into the Oval Office. Eisenhower was less deferential to the military than he seemed likely to be, Kennedy was not at all beholden to the pope, George W. Bush was smarter than portrayed and Barack Obama has not led a charge from the left-least of all on behalf of the civil liberties that have eroded since September 11, 2001.

In pursuit of both terrorists and common criminals, Obama has perpetuated so many of the Bush administration’s policies that even Republicans might take heart. Granted, he triggered an outcry on the right when he attempted to close the Guantánamo prison and try the accused 9/11 plotters in federal court, and he repudiated the Bush/Cheney torture policies by ordering interrogators to abide by the Army Field Manual. His moderately liberal judicial nominees, including two for the Supreme Court, have not won him points with the Federalist Society, which grooms young conservatives for the bench.

Michael Winship: Eric Cantor: Mean, Ornery and Just Plain Wrong

Cantor’s ideological purity overrules common sense and heart

For Manhattan at least, last week was the weather week that wasn’t. But the minor earthquake and weakened Hurricane Irene served as reminders of the caprice of nature and — only a couple of weeks before the tenth anniversary of 9/11 — the knowledge that at any given moment calamity literally is just around the corner.

Both also should serve as wake-up calls to those know-nothings and kleptocrats who reject the value of government and would like it rendered down to nothingness — the helpless infant that Eric Cantor, Grover Norquist and their pals wish to see drowned in the bathtub.

Harry Shearer: The Two Things Obama Got Wrong  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

August. The month that Democrats seem to think doesn’t count. Think John Kerry in 2004. Think Barack Obama the last two years. Somebody had better look at Washington Democrats’ calendars and circle August in red. It might help.

This August, in addition to the media swoonfest over Michele Bachmann’s meaningless Ames straw poll victory (which even the media polpundits admitted was meaningless), there have been new signs that the economy is swooning, too. Pinch me if I’m dreaming, but isn’t it 2009? It must be, because the president is about to deliver a major speech on jobs.

Republicans are trying to sell the false premise that protecting the environment inevitably means sacrificing jobs. President Obama should denounce this snake oil for what it is-rather than appear to accept it.

The GOP presidential candidates are in remarkable agreement on two articles of faith: The human imagination, apparently, is incapable of conjuring any circumstance under which any tax may ever be raised. And the Environmental Protection Agency is a sinister laboratory where Birkenstock-shod evildoers conjure regulations purposefully designed to rob Americans of their God-given jobs.

MIchelle Chen: Georgia’s Celebrated No-Cost Labor Scheme: Cheating the Jobless?

For a typical boss, there’s only one thing better than getting away with not paying your workers: getting the government to supply you with people who will work for free. It’s an employer’s dream that may soon become reality around the country, as President Obama has moved toward incorporating it in his emerging job-creation agenda.

The job-creation flavor of the week is GeorgiaWork$, a job program that has for several years funneled unemployed workers into job slots as “trainees.” Under this half-internship, half-indentured servitude scheme, a worker can earn a $240 weekly stipend on top of regular unemployment benefits for eight weeks, working 24 hours per week. Unlike other job subsidy programs (pdf), which use generally use public dollars to supplement workers’ regular earnings, GeorgiaWork$ allows the state to capitalize on existing unemployment payments while giving a free boost to private employers. Workers, often hired in service sectors like child care and restaurant work, can only hope that their bosses will hire them after their preliminary test run ends.

This system fits well with Obama’s anti-spending, quasi-pro-stimulus double-speak, and his forthcoming jobs plan may include a federal version of Georgia’s virtually free labor system.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: The Last Labor Day?

Let’s get it over with and rename the holiday “Capital Day.” We may still celebrate Labor Day, but our culture has given up on honoring workers as the real creators of wealth and their honest toil-the phrase itself seems antique-as worthy of genuine respect.

Imagine a Republican saying this: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

These heretical thoughts would inspire horror among our friends at Fox News or in the tea party. They’d likely label them as Marxist, socialist or Big Labor propaganda. Too bad for Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president, who offered those words in his annual message to Congress in 1861. Will President Obama dare say anything like this in his jobs speech this week?

Danny Schecter: Obama Readies Tepid Jobs Plan While The Right Settles in for Economic Apocalypse

NEW YORK, Labor Day Weekend 2011 – The magic wand is being readied in the White House as the President and his minions finally unwrap the mother of all jobs plans that will be revealed to the rest of us in a speech next Thursday before the cameras and Congress with the gravitas-packed aura of a State of the Union Address.

Attention, collapsing economy: you finally have the big man’s attention. Nearly 70 organizations are pressing the President to take strong action.

Please give him a break. He’s been busy tending to Empire business — waging GWOT warfare on IraqAfghanistanLibyaYemenPakistanSomalia et.al …

Call it the greatest “long war” in American history: an unending and unbelievably expensive intervention justified as necessary to keep us safe.

We can assume that contingency plans for new wars with Syria, Iran and the Republic of Wikileaks are being drafted as we speak.

The August employment report, released on Friday, is bleak on all counts, but at least it leaves no doubt that the United States is in the grip of a severe and worsening jobs crisis. That should lend a sense of urgency to the speech on jobs that President Obama plans to deliver this week.

The August employment report, released on Friday, is bleak on all counts, but at least it leaves no doubt that the United States is in the grip of a severe and worsening jobs crisis. That should lend a sense of urgency to the speech on jobs that President Obama plans to deliver this week.

Michele Chen: Labor Day Showdown: Can Advocates Stop ‘NAFTA of the Pacific’?

This Labor Day, the Pacific Rim will wash into the Midwest’s flagship city, and activists will confront the tides of global commerce with a demand for global economic justice.

At trade talks in Chicago, the Obama administration will work with other officials to develop a trade agreement that will incorporate Vietnam, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia, Chile and Peru. Labor, environmental and human rights groups will gather in the city to warn that the structure, and guiding ideology, of the emerging trade deal could expand a model of free-marketeering that has displaced masses of workers across the globe and granted multinationals unprecedented powers to flout national and international laws.

Maureen Dowd: One and Done?

ONE day during the 2008 campaign, as Barack Obama read the foreboding news of the mounting economic and military catastrophes that W. was bequeathing his successor, he dryly remarked to aides: “Maybe I should throw the game.”

On the razor’s edge of another recession; blocked at every turn by Republicans determined to slice him up at any cost; starting an unexpectedly daunting re-election bid; and puzzling over how to make a prime-time speech about infrastructure and payroll taxes soar, maybe President Obama is wishing that he had thrown the game.

The leader who was once a luminescent, inspirational force is now just a guy in a really bad spot.

Mark Weisbot: Is This Minustah’s ‘Abu Ghraib Moment’ in Haiti?

Shock video of UN soldiers apparently raping a Haitian teenager raises questions about why these ‘peacekeepers’ are there at all

The video is profoundly disturbing. It shows four men, identified as Uruguayan troops from the UN mission in Haiti (Minustah), seemingly in the act of raping an 18-year-old Haitian youth. Two have the victim pinned down on a mattress, with his hands twisted high up his back so that he cannot move. Perhaps the most unnerving part of the video is the constant chorus of laughter from the alleged perpetrators; to them, apparently, it’s just a drunken party.

ABC News reports that a Uruguayan navy lieutenant, Nicolas Casariego, has confirmed the authenticity of the video. A medical certificate filed with the court in Port Salut, a southern coastal town where the incident took place, says that the victim was beaten and had injuries consistent with a sexual assault.

The incident is likely to pour more gasoline on the fire of resentment that Haitians have for the UN troops who have occupied their country for more than seven years. There has been a dire pattern of abuses: in December 2007, more than 100 UN soldiers from Sri Lanka were deported under charges of sexual abuse of under-age girls. In 2005, UN troops went on the rampage in Cité Soleil, one of the poorest areas in Port-au-Prince, killing as many as 23 people, including children, according to witnesses. After the raid, the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders reported: “On that day, we treated 27 people for gunshot wounds. Of them, around 20 were women under the age of 18.”

THE economic crisis in the United States is also a racial crisis. White Americans are hurting, but nonwhite Americans are hurting even more. Yet leaders in both political parties – for different reasons – continue to act as though race were anachronistic and irrelevant in a country where an African-American is the president.

snip

Both parties should accept that the question of whether policies help narrow the racial divide must be part of the discussion. After all, it was the Republican-led search for racial progress in the 1860s and the Democratic-led fight for civil rights in the 1960s – buttressed, of course, by African-Americans’ own freedom struggle – that allowed the election of a black president in 2008.

Joe Conason: How to Honor the True Spirit of 9/11: First, Ignore Limbaugh

f volunteerism is suddenly unpatriotic and even “socialist,” that will come as a nasty surprise to many of the Republicans and conservatives who always have supported such efforts, notably including both presidents named Bush. And if stepping up to help our neighbors and community on 9/11 would somehow dishonor the Americans killed in those infamous attacks-as feverish critics of President Barack Obama now scream-then what do they think actually happened on that day 10 years ago?

The latest outbreak of phony outrage began when the president, following a tradition established by George W. Bush, announced that he and the first lady will mark the upcoming anniversary as a “National Day of Service and Remembrance” and urged Americans to “come together, in their communities and neighborhoods, to honor the victims of 9/11 and to reaffirm the strength of our nation with acts of service and charity.”

To Rush Limbaugh and assorted lesser cogs in the right-wing noise machine, that was a deeply controversial statement and an attempt to “politicize” the event-as if the White House had ordered everybody to put on blue caps, join a local Obama for America chapter and then build a solar house for the poor.

Eugene Robinson: Always Some Bushie There to Remind Us

Thank you, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, for emerging from your secure, undisclosed locations to remind us how we got into this mess: It didn’t happen by accident.

The important thing isn’t what Bush says in his interview with National Geographic or what scores Cheney tries to settle in his memoir. What matters is that as they return to the public eye, they highlight their record of wrongheaded policy choices that helped bring the nation to a sour, penurious state.

David Sirota: The Lesson of the Chinese Invasion

Many economic Nostradamuses have long predicted that the epitaph on America’s tombstone will ultimately read, “Made in China.” But casual observers probably didn’t think the funeral procession would happen this fast. In the last year, though, most have wised up. Thanks to a spate of mind-blowing headlines, we are learning that the Chinese invasion isn’t just a distant possibility-it’s happening right now.

First, in February, ABC News reported that almost every Americana-themed trinket sold in the Smithsonian Institute is made in China. Then news hit that San Francisco is importing its new bay bridge from China. Then came the New York Times dispatch about the Big Apple awarding Chinese state-subsidized firms huge taxpayer-funded contracts to “renovate the subway system, refurbish the Alexander Hamilton Bridge over the Harlem River and build a new Metro-North train platform near Yankee Stadium.”

Derek Lazzaro: American Officials Enjoy Lives Without Shame

Once upon a time, there was a specific word to describe the misdeed of an officeholder or custodian of trust who had betrayed his or her duties: malfeasance.

That word, originating from ancient Latin, can be translated into modern English to mean a “bad doing.”

If you believe the old tales, malfeasance once was an offense that carried stiff penalties: public humiliation, social ostracism, and civil or criminal sanctions.

And in traditional cultures with shame, a disgraced official would resign-or worse.

No longer, it seems.

ARGENTINA may seem like one of the last countries on earth to offer lessons for dealing with economic malaise. Once the eighth-largest economy in the world, it steadily slid through the 20th century, thanks to decades of repressive dictatorships and inconsistent market experiments. This ended ignominiously in 2001, when it defaulted on $100 billion in sovereign debt, plunging over half its 35 million people into poverty.

That, at least, is the Argentina people know. Since then, it has performed an economic U-turn – an achievement largely unnoticed outside Latin America, but one that President Obama and Congress should look to for inspiration.

Robert Kuttner: Feeble President, Feeble Plans

Obama’s jobs plan: Go work for free!

On Wednesday, I posted an item titled “How Not to Solve the Jobs Problem.” The case in point is President Barack Obama’s embrace of a state program called Georgia Works, which tries to turn unemployment insurance into a kind of sing-for-your-supper “workfare” program.

Jobless workers in Georgia drawing unemployment compensation are encouraged to go work for private employers-for free-in exchange for some kind of training. They get a small onetime stipend of $240 as an inducement. The premise is that working for free will help them get a foot in the door and maybe get hired (if the employer hires). According to Georgia’s own statistics, however, only about 15 percent do.

This pitifully inadequate program is very likely to be part of Obama’s forthcoming jobs speech.

But let’s drill deeper. Why is the administration embracing such a right-wing and futile program? Obviously, the problem in Georgia is the unemployment rate, of 10.1 percent, not the fact that unemployed workers lack a few weeks’ training for low-wage jobs.

Mark Engler: Is “Free Trade” Obama’s Jobs Plan?

After a slight scheduling kerfuffle, President Obama is now set to give a major speech on jobs before a joint session of Congress next Thursday, September 8. Commentators have speculated that Obama could “go big” in his proposals to fight unemployment, and there are some solid suggestions on the table for how the government could help put Americans back to work. These include major investment in public infrastructure and changing the tax structure in order to reward businesses for creating U.S. jobs, rather than off-shoring their production abroad.

Unfortunately, Obama is also likely to advance some bad ideas. In his pledge to “to find bipartisan solutions” to the country’s economic problems, the president will almost certainly push several neoliberal “free trade” agreements. Specifically, he is expected to reassert his support for previously stalled trade pacts with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea.

Wendel Potter: Rick Perry’s Texas Health Care Hoax

In his quest to win the Republican presidential nomination, Texas Gov. Rick Perry is perpetuating a convincing hoax: that implementing Texas-style tort reform would go a long way toward curing what ails the U.S. health care system.

Like his fellow GOP contenders, Perry consistently denounces “Obamacare” as “a budget-busting, government takeover of healthcare” and “the greatest intrusion on individual freedom in a generation.” He promises to repeal the law if elected.

Unlike those in the “repeal-and-replace” wing of the Republican Party, however, Perry has emerged as leader of the “repeal-and-let-the-states-figure-it-out” wing that believes the federal government has no legitimate role in fixing America’s health care system.

Racism in the application of capital punishment has been well documented in the civilian justice system since the Supreme Court reinstated the penalty in 1976. Now comes evidence that racial disparity is even greater in death penalty cases in the military system.

Minority service members are more than twice as likely as whites – after accounting for the crimes’ circumstances and the victims’ race – to be sentenced to death, according to a forthcoming study co-written by David Baldus, an eminent death-penalty scholar, who died in June.

The analysis is so disturbing because the military has made sustained, often successful efforts to rid its ranks of discrimination. But even with this record, its failure to apply the death penalty fairly is more proof that capital punishment cannot be free of racism’s taint. It is capricious, barbaric and discriminatory, and should be abolished.

Glenn Greenwald: A Tweet That Explains Everything

In connection with this matter, I was literally awake all night overseeing (with complete uselessness) the successful birth of six puppies — an amazing and moving experience that I hope never to repeat again for as long as I live — and was therefore not planning on writing today as a result of the ensuing exhaustion.  But then I saw the Tweet That Explains Everything.  A momentous controversy erupted earlier this afternoon when President Obama announced that he wanted to deliver a speech about jobs to a joint session of Congress next Thursday at 9:00 p.m., which happens to be the same date and time of a planned GOP presidential debate, prompting House Speaker John Boehner to respond that he would convene a joint session on Wednesday — the day before — but not on Thursday.

The profound issues raised by this conflict prompted an orgy of probing analysis and vibrant debate among political journalists, party spokespeople and various partisan loyalists over who was being dishonest and Outrageous (indeed, so weighty and consequential is this showdown that it even subordinated the day’s prior top news story involving the scheduling snafus of Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann in Iowa).  Thankfully, we have a free and adversarial watchdog media in this nation to sort out the competing claims and to keep the citizenry informed and focused with respect to the Wednesday/Thursday conflict, which is what produced this aforementioned Tweet:

@ChuckTodd

Going on #hardball now to talk about the day of Washington gamesmanship re: speech to Congress

Ari Berman: The GOP War on Voting

In a campaign supported by the Koch brothers, Republicans are working to prevent millions of Democrats from voting next year

As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. “What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century,” says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.

Amanda Marcotte: Rick Perry’s Demeaning Abortion Doctrine

The Texas governor’s real anti-abortion agenda – enforcing sexual abstinence – not only insults women; it doesn’t work

Rick Perry’s chances at passing himself off as a reasonable Republican were diminished considerably yet again this week, when the Centre for Reproductive Rights secured a victory against a draconian anti-abortion regulation Perry rushed through the legislature in May, claiming while doing so that it was an emergency measure. When US district judge Sam Sparks rejected the law and blocked enforcement, he created an occasion for the national media to look more closely at Perry’s record on women’s rights. What they’ll find is that Perry goes far beyond the usual anti-abortion platitudes: he not only bears a zealous hatred of abortion rights, but also a hostility to contraception and sex education.

E. J. Dionne, Jr. Obama’s Paradox Problem

Call it the Party-of-Government Paradox: If the nation’s capital looks dysfunctional, it will come back to hurt President Obama and the Democrats, even if the Republicans are primarily responsible for the dysfunction.

Then there is the Bipartisanship Paradox: No matter how far the president bends over backward to appeal to or appease the Republicans-no matter how nice, conciliatory, friendly or reasonable he tries to be-voters will judge him according to the results. And the evidence since 2009 is that accommodation won’t get Obama much anyway.

This creates the Election Paradox: Up to a point, Republicans in Congress can afford to let their own ratings fall well below the president’s, as long as they drag him further into negative territory. If the president’s ratings are poor next year, Democrats won’t be able to defeat enough Republicans to take back the House and hold the Senate. The GOP can win if the mood is terribly negative toward Washington because voters see Obama as the man in charge.

Michael Deibert: The U.N. in Haiti: Time to Adapt or Time to Go

In the summer of 2009, visiting Haiti for the first time after an absence of three years, I found the country in better shape than at any time since I started visiting there in 1997.

Three years after the inauguration of René Préval as Haiti’s president (after the two-year tenure of an unelected interim government), the population of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, again felt safe enough to patronize downtown bars and kerosene-lit roadside stands late into the evening, where once armed gangs controlled entire neighborhoods. Billboards that once praised the infallibility of a succession of maximum leaders instead carried messages about the importance of respect between the population and the police, or decrying discrimination against the disabled.

“When one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it,” wrote Joseph Goebbels, Germany’s Reich minister of propaganda, in 1941. Former Vice President Dick Cheney seems to have taken the famous Nazi’s advice in his new book, “In My Time.” Cheney remains staunch in his convictions on issues from the invasion of Iraq to the use of torture. Telling NBC News in an interview that “there are gonna be heads exploding all over Washington” as a result of the revelations in the book, Cheney’s memoir follows one by his colleague and friend Donald Rumsfeld. As each promotes his own version of history, there are people challenging and confronting them.

Maureen Dowd: What Price Life?

So the big, bad storm huffed and puffed and didn’t blow all the houses in.

Reversing Katrina, on the sixth anniversary of that shameful episode in American history, the response to Irene was more powerful than Irene.

And that made some solipsistic Gothamites who missed their subways and restaurants grouchy. There is no greater abuse to New Yorkers than inconvenience.

Once the storm became “Apocalypse Not,” as The New York Post called it, there were those who accused Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey of overreacting to make up for their infamous underreactions to last year’s Christmas blizzard, when Hizzoner was baking in Bermuda and the Guv was playing at Disney World in Florida with his family.

Eugene Robinson: Jobs: Go Big or Go Home

President Obama’s promised jobs plan needs to be unrealistic and unreasonable, at the very least. If he can crank it all the way up to unimaginable, that would be even better.

This is a moment for the president to suppress his reflex for pre-emptive compromise. The unemployment crisis is so deep and self-perpetuating that only a big, surprising, over-the-top jobs initiative could have real impact. Boldness will serve the nation well-and, coincidentally, boost Obama’s re-election prospects.

The political calculus is pretty simple. If voters base their decision on the state of the economy on Election Day, Obama is in trouble. Even the most optimistic scenarios predict that unemployment will still be above 8 percent next fall. These rosy projections envision month after month of painfully slow growth, the kind that is barely discernible. Pessimists see another dip into recession.

Richard Eskow: Eight Reasons Why Raising the Medicare Age Is the Worst Presidential “Bargain” Since 1854

When it comes to the “Grand Bargain” they’re pushing in Washington, the movie posters for The Fly said it best: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Other people are using our lives as bargaining chips. Whether it’s the so-called Congressional “Super Committee” or the President’s push for that grandé-sized deal, they want to look “grand” while we get stuck with the “bargain.”

The Capital’s misplaced focus on austerity has led to plenty of bad ideas, but one of the worst is raising the Medicare retirement age to 67. It may be the most destructive deal to come out of Washington since the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. It’s unfair, short-sighted, and will actually cost the economy more money than we’re spending today.

No Democratic President would accept an idea like that, right? Right?

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

We have begun the election march of the trolls. They have crawled out of the sewers of public relations firms, polling organizations, the commercial media, the two corporate political parties and elected office to fill the airwaves with inanities and absurdities until the final inanity-the 2012 presidential election. Journalists, whose role has been reduced to purveyors of court gossip, whether on Fox or MSNBC, descend in swarms to report pseudo-events such as the Ames straw poll, where it costs $30 to cast a ballot. And then, almost immediately, they blithely inform us that the Iowa poll is meaningless now that Rick Perry has entered the race. The liberal trolls, as they do in every election cycle, are beating their little chests about the perfidiousness of the Democratic Party and Barack Obama. It is a gesture performed not to effect change but to burnish their credentials as moralists. They know, as do we, that they will trot obediently into the voting booth in 2012 to do as they are told. And everywhere the pulse of the nation is being assiduously monitored through polls and focus groups, not because our opinions matter, but because our troll candidates understand that by parroting back to us our own viewpoints they can continue to spend their days lapping up corporate money with other trolls in the two houses of Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court and television studios where they chat with troll celebrity journalists.

The only commodity the troll state offers is fear. The corporate trolls, such as the Koch brothers, terrify the birthers, creationists, militia lovers, tea party militants, right-to-life advocates, Christian fascists and God-fearing red-white-and-blue patriots by proclaiming that unless they vote for Perry or Mitt Romney or Michele Bachmann or some other product of the lunatic fringe of our political establishment, the American family will be destroyed, our children will be corrupted and the country will turn socialist. Barack Obama, who they whisper is a closet Muslim, will take away their guns, raise their taxes and bring homosexual couples into kindergartens.

George Zornick: Fear, Inc.: America’s Islamophobia Network

At this time last year, as the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks approached, the country was gripped by a pernicious debate over a “mosque” (really, an Islamic cultural center) near Ground Zero in New York City.

Pushback against the project actually began months earlier and was led by a group called Stop Islamization of America, which launched “Campaign Offensive: Stop the 911 Mosque!” in May 2010. The group’s founder, Pamela Geller, charged that “this is Islamic domination and expansionism. The location is no accident. Just as Al-Aqsa was built on top of the Temple in Jerusalem.” The group’s co-director, Robert Spencer, helped Geller organize rallies and protest campaigns aimed at a lower Manhattan community board, which reported getting “hundreds and hundreds” of calls and e-mails from around the world as a result of the well-funded and highly coordinated campaign.

David Sirota: 25 Years Later, How ‘Top Gun’ Made America Love War

Americans are souring on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military budget is under siege as Congress looks for spending to cut. And the Army is reporting record suicide rates among soldiers. So who does the Pentagon enlist for help in such painful circumstances?

Hollywood.

In June, the Army negotiated a first-of-its-kind sponsorship deal with the producers of “X-Men: First Class,” backing it up with ads telling potential recruits that they could live out superhero fantasies on real-life battlefields. Then, in recent days, word leaked that the White House has been working with Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow on an election-year film chronicling the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.

A country questioning its overall military posture, and a military establishment engaging in a counter-campaign for hearts and minds – if this feels like deja vu, that’s because it’s taking place on the 25th anniversary of the release of “Top Gun.”

Dick Cheney’s hyper-hyped autobiography is short on revelations (it turns out that the “secret undisclosed location” was his house) but long, very long, on excuse making when it comes to the wars of whim into which he steered the United States. The former vice president is still sure there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, dismissing any talk of apologizing for his own weapons of mass deception pontificating in the run-up to the Iraq War. In fact, Cheney remains enthusiastic about every aspect of the wars of whim he steered the country into as Ronald Reagan’s chief congressional ally during the Iran-Contra scandal, George H.W. Bush’s hapless secretary of defense and George W. Bush’s neoconman prince regent, But where’s the chapter on Cheney’s heroic service in Vietnam? Of, that’s right, he had “other priorities” than responding to draft notices.

Try as readers may to find the tale of Cheney’s Vietnam service or, to be more precise, his meticulous avoidance of service, they just won’t find that In My Times offers much in the way of revelation about Cheney’s times.

Cheney has always positioned himself as an arch militarist. But when he had a chance to get on the frontlines, he instead deferments. A lot of them

MIchelle Chen: Migrants in Limbo as Libyan Revolution Reaches Endgame

As the Libyan uprising reaches its climax, gun battles flare, bodies pile up in hospitals, and the capital is paralyzed in fear. And somewhere in the revolutionary endgame, outsiders who have no part in either side of the upheaval find their lives hanging in the balance. Masses of migrant workers, part of a stream of cheap labor that poured in from Asia and Africa during Libya’s boom years, helped build Gaddafi’s oil empire, witnessed its rapid demise and could end up helping rebuild the country from ruins.

Following the rebels’ entry into the capital, the International Organization for Migration has been working to ferry out migrants stranded in Tripoli, though it reported being stalled for a few days due to security concerns. The IOM reported Friday it had picked up a group that included “Egyptians, Filipinos, Canadians, Algerians, Moroccans and an Italian.” But many more migrants remain besieged, and the IOM has sent another boat to retrieve more workers, including possibly those living on the outskirts of Tripoli, where many of the workers from sub-Saharan Africa are concentrated.

Simon Balto: Hurricane Katrina, Martin Luther King, and the Violence of US Racial History

Had Hurricane Irene not intervened on events in Washington, this weekend would have seen an expected quarter of a million people on hand in D.C. to witness the official dedication of the memorial in Washington, D.C. to honor Dr. Martin Luther King. In a nod to civil rights history, planners of the dedication ceremony purposefully scheduled it for this Sunday, August 28, in order that it would coincide with the forty-eighth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at which King delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. The looming threat of the storm unfortunately forced the postponement of the event, which will now be held sometime a bit later this fall, but the scheduled date of the event and the organizers’ efforts to entwine the past and the present are nevertheless significant. Within the context of U.S. racial history, the ceremony promised to be of epic symbolic proportions, with Barack Obama-the nation’s first black president and, for many, the ostensible realization of King’s integrationist dreams-providing remarks on the legacies and meanings of King and his fellow civil rights crusaders. Obama-as-the-fulfillment-of-King’s-dream is, of course, an erroneous and reductive formulation, as if the latter’s visions were either so racially provincial or electorally minded as to be satiated by the image of a black man holding the country’s highest office. Obama’s election represents progress, to be sure, but of a bounded sort that does little in and of itself to realize King’s visions of the possible. Indeed, what King fought for, with mounting urgency and an increasingly global and capacious rendering of the “beloved community,” was the revaluation and restructuring of political and social values and priorities. The point was not to see a black man elected to the presidency; it was to fundamentally reconfigure the nature of an increasingly reckless, intransigent, and immoral power structure in the United States.

Ted Rall: 9/11: Ten Years Later, Americans Still Stupid and Vulnerable

They say everything changed on 9/11. No one can dispute that. But we didn’t learn anything.

Like other events that forced Americans to reassess their national priorities (the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, Sputnik) the attacks on New York and Washington were a traumatic, teachable moment.

The collective attention of the nation was finally focused upon problems that had gone neglected for many years. 9/11 was a chance to get smart-but we blew it.

First and foremost the attacks gave the United States a rare opportunity to reset its international reputation. Even countries known for anti-Americanism offered their support. “We are all Americans,” ran the headline of the French newspaper Le Monde.

The century of U.S. foreign policy that led to 9/11-supporting dictators, crushing democratic movements, spreading gangster capitalism at the point of a thousand nukes-should and could have been put on hold and reassessed in the wake of 9/11.

It wasn’t time to act. It was time to think.

Paul Vallely: There is No Moral Case for Tax Havens

They are the epitome of unfairness and injustice, leaving ordinary citizens to foot the bill for multinational corporations

There is a building in the Cayman Islands that is home to 12,000 corporations. It must be a very big building. Or a very big tax scam. Tax havens are in the spotlight since the Chancellor, George Osborne, did a deal the other day with the Swiss authorities to slap a levy on secret bank accounts held there by British citizens. Opinions are divided on the move, which could net the Treasury £5bn, but which tacitly legitimizes bank accounts kept secret from the Inland Revenue. It is a de facto amnesty for those guilty of tax evasion crimes. And they will pay less than they would if they declared their income to the British taxman.

Are there any legitimate reasons why anyone would want to have a secret bank account – and pay a premium to maintain their anonymity – or move their money to one of the pink dots on the map which are the final remnants of the British empire: the Caymans, Bermuda, the Turks and Caicos and the British Virgin Islands?

The moral case against is clear enough. Tax havens epitomize unfairness, cheating and injustice. They replace the old morality embodied in the Golden Rule of reciprocity – that we should do as we would be done by – with a new version that insists that those who have the gold make the rules.