Talk Nation

By Stan Cox

Prairie Writers Circle

The Food and Drug Administration found recently that samples of a feed by-product from dozens of corn-ethanol plants were contaminated with antibiotics. With that news, producing vehicle fuel from grain is looking not only like a wasteful and inefficient process, but also like a danger to human health.

Growing corn is a leading cause of soil erosion as well as water depletion and pollution. Corn ethanol plants further stress our water supplies by consuming four gallons of water for every gallon of fuel produced.

Now to the list of ethanol’s environmental insults we can add pharmaceutical pollution.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with getting help from biological processes to meet industrial needs. But when colossal volumes of product and enormous profits are at stake, as they are in the alternative-fuel industry, biological methods can backfire disastrously.

To survive economically, ethanol plants depend on sales of distillers grains, solid material left over from corn fermentation. Distillers grains are a nutritious, high-protein livestock feed. But they can be laced with multiple antibiotics, the FDA and University of Minnesota scientists have found.

Addition of antibiotics is one of several methods ethanol manufacturers use to control bacterial contamination. Bacteria interfere with the work of yeast cultures that convert sugars to ethanol. Antibiotics can increase ethanol output by 1 to 5 percent, according to Ethanol Producer magazine.

That sounds small, but that extra efficiency could boost profits by many millions of dollars as national production is scaled up from its current 9 billion gallons per year.

The discovery of antibiotics in distillers grains has raised concern that ethanol plants could breed and disperse drug-resistant bacteria, and that those bugs could share their genes with bacterial species that cause human diseases. Sampling by university and industry researchers has turned up antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the processing streams of ethanol plants.

This case of pharmaceutical contamination comes on top of a half-century of over-prescribing antibiotics for medical and veterinary use, along with routine feeding of the drugs to healthy livestock to promote growth. Nature’s predictable response: bacterial populations that can no longer be killed by drugs that were once used to treat them. Now, of 90,000 Americans who die of bacterial infections each year, more than 60,000 are killed by such drug-resistant types, according to the Centers for Disease Control (pdf).

The ethanol industry says that one widely used drug, virginiamycin, doesn’t show up in meat produced with distillers grains, so we need not worry about the food supply (pdf). But such assurances take the narrowest possible view of the threat.

Johns Hopkins University researchers argued in 2008 that public health officials have also taken a narrow approach to antibiotic resistance, thinking clinically “rather than ecologically in terms of reservoirs of resistance genes that may flow across the microbial ecosystem.” Use of the drugs in agriculture is more widespread than in medicine, and, they contend, creates excellent conditions for the spread of resistant organisms.

In fact, it’s already happening, with germs borne via manure, air, groundwater, soil, flies and irrigation water.

The Johns Hopkins review concluded that overuse of antibiotics in agriculture “has compromised the efficacy of most antimicrobials used in the United States and throughout the world.”

Distillers grains are set to move beyond the feedlot, having been tested as fertilizer on farms, lawns and gardens, and as feed in fish and shrimp farming. The pet food industry also is starting to use distillers grains, and we don’t know what evolutionary mischief might start going on in the feces of dogs, which harbor an especially rich range of bacterial species.

Meanwhile, methods being developed to manufacture new biofuels also depend on biological processes. If and when fuels from algae or cellulose are taken to the billions-of-gallons scale, vast new quantities of antibiotics could be deployed.

Ethanol can be manufactured without using antibiotics — just ask the liquor distillers — so all such drugs should be banned from biofuel production.

In fact, ethanol’s drug problem is just the latest of many reasons to impose a moratorium on production of fuels from grains. If industry cannot supply sufficient quantities of alternative fuels without risking an even deeper medical crisis, it might just be another sign that our thirst for vehicle fuel has outgrown all ecological limits.

Stan Cox is lead scientist for the Land Institute in Salina, Kan., and author of “Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine.” He wrote this comment for the institute’s Prairie Writers Circle. Write to him at t.stan@cox.net.

We have now grown up as a country after 8 years of being run by a petulant child. What a wonderful and historic day, and what an opportunity we have to save this country from the worst impulses of conservatism.

The Republican party is in shambles and has a choice to either grow up or be forever marginalized.

OK so Sarah Palin, aka Annie Oakley, comes out and delivers an eloquent assault on Barack Obama for his lack of experience (and when it comes to lack of experience she’s certainly familiar with the condition) and she does it with wit and eloquence (though the speech was written before she was even selected and only edited a bit to “feminize” it some) and now commenters are starting to tell us that it is a sure sign that she’s ready for the bigtime because she’s so poised and eloquent and called Barack Obama names.

Right.

And the Republicans, including their aged candidate, blow their collective gaskets hammering at us over and over again with the idea that eloquence and good speechifying aren’t enough to qualify someone for a position in the Executive Branch or for President (and make no mistake, a VP better be qualified for that job or not get selected).

I’m just sayin’.

Want to know what rightwing Republican economic policies and Alan Greenspan combined to do to our economy? Give this NPR broadcast a listen. (click on the “full episode” link under the photo)

What ought to really boggle the mind on this economic horror is that it is just one slice of the pie. There is no doubt that there are other economic puddles out there that are also drying up.

It’s going to get worse folks, much worse.

If being a POW is absolute qualification for good judgment and common sense we better listen to what this guy has to say. Why being a POW is no recommendation or qualification for the Presidency. This from a military website written by a POW who had been in Hanoi for two years by the time McCain arrived and endured far more torture and suffering. As he points out in his piece

John McCain served his time as a POW with great courage, loyalty and tenacity. More that 600 of us did the same. After our repatriation a census showed that 95% of us had been tortured at least once. The Vietnamese were quite democratic about it. There were many heroes in North Vietnam. I saw heroism every day there. And we motivated each other to endure and succeed far beyond what any of us thought we had in ourselves. Succeeding as a POW is a group sport, not an individual one. We all supported and encouraged each other to survive and succeed. John knows that. He was not an individual POW hero. He was a POW who surmounted the odds with the help of many comrades, as all of us did.

I furthermore believe that having been a POW is no special qualification for being President of the United States. The two jobs are not the same, and POW experience is not, in my opinion, something I would look for in a presidential candidate.

Sadly, McCain’s POW status is not unique, nor his experiences any different from anyone else’s there nor his heroic acts any different from the heroic acts of the other POWs. Yet McCain can’t let a moment go by or answer a single question without mentioning his time as a POW, as if that gives him a pass on everything else. Hell, he even invoked his POW status when asked what his favorite music was, which is patently ridiculous. (ABBA, if you want to know)

John McCain is profoundly unqualified to be a US Senator, let alone President of the US and most assuredly not President in these difficult times at the end of 8 years of an Administration that has done more to destroy this country than any external enemy we’ve ever had.

I’ve always like Dock Ellis.

I’ve had concerns about Hillary’s candidacy for a long time but they have varied in intensity and focus over time. My main initial concern was that I really didn’t want a legacy President but that she was vastly more qualified for the job than just about anyone else and that Obama was interesting but I knew very little about him and would happily have voted for her given the options available.

So I began listening to other candidates and found Edwards the most interesting from a policy perspective and he became my candidate of choice, with Hillary second, primarily because of health care for both but his stands on other issues made him first on the list. Obama was still interesting but, like Krugman, I felt his health care approach was inadequate. Then Edwards dropped out and I began to look more closely at Obama and realized that I not only liked what I saw and heard there were significant differences in how he approached issues that I preferred to Hillary’s approach. But I would still have happily voted for Clinton and remember saying so quite specifically after one of their one-on-one debates. I was impressed by both.

Then it became clear that he was the better campaigner, that he had scanned the landscape and mapped out a much clearer path to the nomination that included the widest range of America, and I really liked that, while she more and more began to resemble an old-line DLC candidate, and I definitely didn’t like that.

But I would still have happily voted for her had she prevailed.

Then came the early Spring and Obama showed amazing strength in the primaries and she showed amazing weakness, both in style and in tactics and he impressed me even more and her shortsightedness began to concern me.

I was still quite willing to vote for her however, had she prevailed but I was now taking a very close look at Obama.

Then the accusations of gender bias started coming out of the Clinton camp and not without justification in a certain sense because the more out-there Obama supporters sometimes exhibited such behavior and it was easy to cherry-pick that to focus on, but Obama didn’t nor did his close campaign people. But that’s politics and to be expected, just as the subtle playing of the race card by Clinton surrogates was to be expected (the First Surrogate was a huge disappointment in that regard) but she didn’t do that and I wrote it off as typical politics.

Then she began the “he’s not a Muslim, as far as I know” crap, that’s not a surrogate speaking, that’s her saying that. But Obama was nothing but gracious in his response (while surrogates played the game surrogates played, I generally don’t blame the candidate that much for over-the-top supporters, some but not that much, on either side). And then she made the absurd Bosnia statements, not once but many times and then claimed “fatigue” at the very time she was also putting out an ad stating that she’d be the best one to respond correctly to the 3 a.m phone call, rather a bit of cognitive dissonance there, and then she made the “white Americans” statement which was truly bizarre and her campaign began to work that theme rather strongly while ignoring the reality that Obama has done quite well indeed in very white states, then they started pushing hard at the elitist argument (which I’ve always hated) and it became not just occasional surrogates talking but an actual campaign tactic which she herself echoed and it became much harder to think kindly of her as a candidate.

But I still would have voted for her if it came to that.

Then she mentioned assassination (and it matters not what she “actually meant”, she said it and it was bad judgment to do so and no, I don’t think she was hoping for assassination) and then responded badly to being called on it and she lost me completely, especially as she continued to fail to thrive politically and began rewriting history and playing “if” games with numbers and whining about “counting every vote” because to disenfranchise voters is unDemocratic while she and her campaign continually sought to demean voters like me who live in caucus states by implying that we aren’t really representative of our states (and believe me anyone who actually attended an overcrowded caucus here knew better) and the dissonance of her campaign began to really bother me.

And she lost my vote and because I live in a state that is so blue it blends in with the surrounding ocean I actually may not vote at all in the unlikely chance that she becomes the candidate.

But she won’t, because she’s lost and she seems determined to bring down the Democratic Party along with her candidacy because if she can’t have it than no one can and I’ve had quite enough of that attitude for the last 8 years.

And it doesn’t have a goddamned thing to do with sexism, nor does most of the opposition to her that I’ve seen from thoughtful liberals and progressives (the majority).

There are still things that concern me about Obama’s policies, on health care for sure, but from what I’ve seen his campaign has been the one behaving the most honorably and with the most concern for the nation while hers has appeared deeply ego driven (notwithstanding that it takes a big ego to run for that office at all).

I rather like a quote I saw recently “when I go into the voting booth and pull the lever for Obama I still cry out Edwards’ name” and that is still the case with me but I will be extremely happy to be able to vote for Obama because he’s lightyears better than anyone else out there now, sadly including Hillary.

I have also asked, as have others, time and again for some reasons why those in here who support her do so and haven’t gotten much in the way of an answer.

My wife, who is around Hillary’s age, is furious with her, even more so than I am. She is disappointed precisely because she saw Hillary as a great candidate to be the first woman President and feels truly let down by what is happening. All the complaints listed about the Obama campaign in this article in Britain’s New Statesman are the very things that the Clintons say are necessary in terms of tactics to “season” Obama as a candidate (for the future) when it comes from their side. Either the behavior is acceptable or it isn’t and my wife and I come down on the “it isn’t acceptable” from either camp but the level of such behavior from the Clinton side is just becoming too much to bear.

GritTV interview with Kevin Phillips.

Probably the best article I’ve read on the situation in Iraq and it comes from a Canadian publication, Macleans. Free of spin and ideology the author speaks from direct experience outside the protective bubble of US propaganda but also outside of the internal American political debate as well. Iran is seriously engaged in Iraq, but not quite as the US administration would have us believe and in fact as a direct result, along with the pipsqueak but deadly AQ in Iraq, of our invasion and utterly screwed up occupation.

An excerpt, but read the whole article and learn:

America’s other main enemy is al-Qaeda in Iraq, which is to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda what a cheap watch is to a Swiss timepiece—effective, easily reproduced, and disposable. Al-Qaeda did not exist in Iraq before the invasion, but today it, along with Iran, are the two strongest arguments the U.S. makes for “staying the course.” Al-Qaeda in Iraq is essentially a religious criminal gang that kills anyone who threatens its power or differs from its Salafist views on establishing a perverse form of an Islamic state. Its death squads and enormously destructive truck bombs have killed thousands of Shias, but Sunnis, too, have suffered al-Qaeda’s violent nihilism. Car bombs, assassinations and “religious punishments,” including decapitations and cutting off the fingers of smokers, have put Sunni Iraq under a Mordor-like shadow of terror and justified collective punishment from the Shias. In his testimony to Congress, Gen. Petraeus pointed out the lethal threat of al-Qaeda. But this should come as no surprise to an American general—because the U.S. Army helped create al-Qaeda in Iraq.

But what’s really true is that, like Jane Smiley, I too have seen this coming. The behavior of today’s Republican Party is a direct outgrowth of its historical political posturing and policy-making. I think for me that awareness came the day my father, a lifelong Republican and a conservative in the traditional mold, announced that given the behavior and policies of Richard Nixon he would henceforth never again vote for a Republican. That was over 30 years ago but Dad could see the writing on the wall even then. It is no coincidence that two of the Nixon Administration alumni most angered by Nixon’s downfall and most dedicated to creating an Imperial Presidency with all its trappings of power and privilege, are Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, in my opinion the two most responsible for the current ongoing destruction of a United States governed by its Constitution.

From the Smiley commentary, but read the whole thing. It’s a winner.

I don’t doubt Dean. I always thought that for a Republican, he had something of a conscience. What amazes me is that Republicans who are now exclaiming at what has happened to the Republican Party (and yes, I talked to my mother this morning) didn’t see this coming. Everything, every value, that the Republicans have held up for my lifetime as desirable has been pointing us in this direction. As I’ve said before on the HuffPost, all of this is the necessary consequence of traditional Republican values, not an accidental byproduct. Or maybe I’ll put it this way — when you reject common humanity, value profits above people, practice sectarian religion, feel contempt for the choices of others, exalt wealth, conflate consumersim with citizenship, join exclusive clubs, daily practice unkindness rather than kindness, and develop theories, such as those of free market capitalism, that allow you to congratulate yourself morally for selfishness and short-sightedness, then being a gang member is in your future.

A few weeks ago 7 soldiers, mostly sergeants, serving in Iraq wrote a scathing Op-Ed for the NYTimes voicing their frustrations with the mission, the failure of leadership and the desperate condition of our military in Iraq. Their voices mostly disappeared into the ether, with little or no mention in the major media, no followup, no commentary and no interviews.

Contrast that with the two civilians, Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack – war supporters inaccurately put forth as critics, who spent a couple of days on a Pentagon scripted junket to Iraq and wrote their own Op-Ed in the NYTimes gushing about how swimmingly the war was going and that “we might just win”. Notwithstanding that such a sentiment is hardly what could be considered overwhelmingly positive it was touted endlessly in virtually all media outlets as “proof” that even “war critics” like O’Hanlon and Pollack were now convinced the surge was working and Iraq was a glorious Bush victory-in-waiting (we just might win!).

The soldiers saw it differently.

VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day.

And now the ultimate insult to these brave soldiers, who were ridiculed by rightwingnuts everywhere as disgruntled malcontents or simply ignored (nothing to see here, let’s move on). Of the seven soldiers who contributed to that Op-Ed piece one was gravely wounded before it was even published (he survived with a serious head wound) and now comes word that two other sergeants, Staff Sergeant Yance Gray and Sergeant Omar Mora, died a couple of days ago along with 5 other soldiers in vehicle accident in Iraq.

It has been popular to dismiss comments about how so many of the wingnuts cheerleading this war are “chickenhawks” by saying they have the freedom to choose but to have brave soldiers like these sergeants who are brave not only in battle but in bucking the wingnut military propaganda mentality unfortunately so prevalent in today’s military with the courage to state their opinions clearly and forcefully, have to lose their lives in this war is the ultimate insult by all war supporters.

Support the troops? Bush and his ilk don’t know what that means. Honor our soldiers? They haven’t a clue.

I mourn for these fine men and for all the fine men and women whose lives have been sacrificed in this unnecessary war which seems designed only to feed Bush and Cheney’s sick, twisted egos.

The level of disgust I feel now not only towards Bush and Cheney but to our politicians, Democratic or Republican, who sit by and do nothing and to the pathetic Fox News addicts cheerleading this disaster.

The American I grew up in may never exist again. These people are destroying our country.

Riverbend is alive and well and now in Syria, having successfully escaped the surging hell that was her home city in Baghdad. She’s been offline for about 4 months since announcing that they would be leaving Iraq and her latest entry explains the difficulties they encountered in just getting a ride, let alone getting out of the country.

How is it that a border no one can see or touch stands between car bombs, militias, death squads and… peace, safety? It’s difficult to believe- even now. I sit here and write this and wonder why I can’t hear the explosions.

I wonder at how the windows don’t rattle as the planes pass overhead. I’m trying to rid myself of the expectation that armed people in black will break through the door and into our lives. I’m trying to let my eyes grow accustomed to streets free of road blocks, hummers and pictures of Muqtada and the rest…

How is it that all of this lies a short car ride away?

How is it indeed? And how is it that our Dear Leader cannot understand that simple fact, that getting out is so much better than staying with the bullets and the bombs and the death squads? That our very presence has robbed Iraqis of those very simple human realities as safety in one’s person and the comfort of friends and neighbors and a functioning infrastructure and the realities of daily life?

We have robbed these good people of so much and all because Bush apparently bought into the Vietnam rhetoric of “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” so much that he escalated it to “we had to destroy the nation in order to save it”.

No, I don’t mean George Bush, Dick Cheney or their gang of thugs though lord knows they are criminals too. I’m referring to the excellent Wesley Clark Op-Ed piece in today’s NYTimes that spells out, in ways even a fifth grader can understand (at least one who attends a school where social studies hasn’t been scrapped) exactly why our current behavior concerning terrorists not only won’t work it makes things worse, not better. [emphasis mine]

If we are to defeat terrorists across the globe, we must do everything possible to deny legitimacy to their aims and means, and gain legitimacy for ourselves. As a result, terrorism should be fought first with information exchanges and law enforcement, then with more effective domestic security measures. Only as a last resort should we call on the military and label such activities “war.” The formula for defeating terrorism is well known and time-proven.

Labeling terrorists as combatants also leads to this paradox: while the deliberate killing of civilians is never permitted in war, it is legal to target a military installation or asset. Thus the attack by Al Qaeda on the destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000 would be allowed, as well as attacks on command and control centers like the Pentagon. For all these reasons, the more appropriate designation for terrorists is not “unlawful combatant” but the one long used by the United States: criminal.

They are criminals, they have always been criminals. Treating them as the second-coming of the Evil Empire is simply ludicrous and gives them an aura of power and influence they simply don’t have, even today after 6 years of bush’s bullshit. They are still criminals and if we want to truly treat them with contempt we’ll lump them in with rapists, murderers and thieves and other common criminals and we’ll track them down with the only process that works, international criminal investigations, trials and jail. Even executing them is a bad idea because that just creates martyrs. Throw them in a hole and toss down food a couple of times a day. They need to be in the dark, not having us (in the person of bush/cheney) shining bright lights on them and giving them the endless attention they crave.

As far as I can tell the only terrorists this country has ever successfully sussed out, captured, prosecuted and sent to prison are the Blind Sheik and his followers who were responsible for the first WTC bombing. Bill Clinton did that, remember? They were found out by police work, they were tracked down with international cooperation (some were caught here some were caught elsewhere) and they were tried, convicted and sentenced in this country. That’s how it’s supposed to work but from the looks of things bush is doing absolutely everything he can to ensure that we will never be able to actually deal with the people who masterminded the attack in NY and D.C. It seems to be the only thing he’s been successful at in his entire tenure as President. Everything he’s done has worked against tracking down and punishing the terrorists and by golly, it’s worked like a charm. They are still out there. Way to go Junior.

What? You don’t remember that headline from today’s Denver Post? That’s because the actual headline was “Capitol gunman’s notes bizarre”

The article goes on to say

In his writings, Snyder had a preoccupation with abortion. In one entry, he said it was his responsibility as sovereign ruler to stop abortion at once. In another entry, he said he would show mercy and pardon all women who had abortions.

He also had numerous references to Jesus Christ, quoted Bible passages and made plans to exercise at a gym every day.

“God is preparing me mentally to kill thousands of police officers,” he wrote at one point. “In the streets, all slain.”

Yep, if he’d looked even slightly Arabic and had ranted about Muhammad and Allah instead of Jesus and God it would have warranted all day coverage on Fox Noise and scary pronouncements about the constant danger of radical Islam. You know, like that terror cell in Miami made up of homeless guys who supposedly wanted to bring down the Sears Tower in Chicago but couldn’t find it on a map and thought they needed uniforms first.

I should also note that there have been more domestic terror attacks by radical self-identified Christians in this country, from bombings to murders to “terroristic threatening” behavior, than by self-identified Islamic extremists even though the Islamic extremists were able to have a bigger impact. Oh, and the Christian terrorists are all Americans attacking Americans, which in my book makes it far worse in terms of terror because it really could be your neighbor.

Bruce Fein of the American Enterprise Institute is no liberal, he’s as conservative as they come and I likely disagree with him 80% of the time on 80% of the issues, but he loves his Constitution and this thoughtful, engaging discussion between Bruce Fein, Bill Moyers and The Nation’s John Nichols is fascinating and revealing as much for its rarity in today’s media as for its civility.

And note that it is Bruce Fein that raises the comparison between Sara Taylor’s invoking of her non-existent “oath to the President” (forgetting that little thing known as the Constitution) and Nazi party members oath to the Fuehrer. Imagine had it been Moyers who had said that, it would have been blared in screaming headlines of Fox and ABC for days.

That this sort of thing is lost in the weeds of PBS is a disgrace and more illustrative of the shame of today’s media than anything I’ve seen lately and compare it to the previous link below to how Lindsey Graham behaved towards Jim Webb.

Make no mistake about it, this is a direct result not only of illegal invasion and occupation but of the bush/cheney policies that took us there and the insanity of politicians like Lindsey Graham and John McCain and all the other Republican candidates for the nomination in 2008.

From the first link:

Lopezromo said a procedure called “dead-checking” was routine. If Marines entered a house where a man was wounded, instead of checking to see whether he needed medical aid, they shot him to make sure he was dead, he testified.

“If somebody is worth shooting once, they’re worth shooting twice,” he said.

And the panicked chatter in the video at the second link from Huckleberry Graham, who is looking and sounding more and more like a deranged serial killer version of Mr. Rogers, is truly pathetic.

In case you were wondering which bush-hating America loathing liberal nutcase was responsible for yesterday’s quotation it was none other than…oops…Barry Goldwater. Oh well, these guys long ago stopped being conservatives if they ever were but read the entire article at the link. It’s a fascinating dissection of the shift in conservative politics that came about post-Watergate and has given us Bush-the-Coward as Frank Rich so aptly describes in his NYTimes op-ed of today (unfortunately behind the paywall).

The New York Times sets the standard for Iraq debate in today’s editorial and it’s about time that the discussion shifts to the realities they lay out. They don’t equivocate, beginning with:

It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.

and ending with

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have used demagoguery and fear to quell Americans’ demands for an end to this war. They say withdrawing will create bloodshed and chaos and encourage terrorists. Actually, all of that has already happened — the result of this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war.

This country faces a choice. We can go on allowing Mr. Bush to drag out this war without end or purpose. Or we can insist that American troops are withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage — with as much effort as possible to stop the chaos from spreading.

It is time for Washington to listen before more American troops are killed or maimed, to say nothing of prolonging the suffering of the Iraqi people any longer, just to keep Bush’s ego from being bruised.

Yes folks, we’re here to play another game of “guess who said this?”…and here’s today’s pertinent quote.

We hear praise of a power-wielding, arm-twisting President who “gets his program through Congress” by knowing the use of power. Throughout the course of history, there have been many other such wielders of power. There have even been dictators who regularly held plebiscites, in which their dictatorships were approved by an Ivory-soap-like percentage of the electorate. But their countries were not free, nor can any country remain free under such despotic power. Some of the current worship of powerful executives may come from those who admire strength and accomplishment of any sort. Others hail the display of Presidential strength … simply because they approve of the result reached by the use of power. This is nothing less than the totalitarian philosophy that the end justifies the means…. If ever there was a philosophy of government totally at war with that of the Founding Fathers, it is this one.

Must be a real Bush-hating anti-American nutcase, right?

So, here’s John Edwards statement about Bush’s disdain for the law of the land.

“Only a president clinically incapable of understanding that mistakes have consequences could take the action he did today. President Bush has just sent exactly the wrong signal to the country and the world. In George Bush’s America, it is apparently okay to misuse intelligence for political gain, mislead prosecutors and lie to the FBI. George Bush and his cronies think they are above the law and the rest of us live with the consequences. The cause of equal justice in America took a serious blow today.”

So Edwards considers Bush “clinically incapable of understanding that mistakes have consequences”.

So let’s look at a clinical profile of a sociopath

Profile of the Sociopath

This website summarizes some of the common features of descriptions of the behavior of sociopaths.

• Glibness and Superficial Charm

• Manipulative and Conning
  They never recognize the rights of others and see their self-serving behaviors as permissible. They appear to be charming, yet are covertly hostile and domineering, seeing their victim as merely an instrument to be used. They may dominate and humiliate their victims.
• Grandiose Sense of Self
  Feels entitled to certain things as “their right.”
• Pathological Lying
  Has no problem lying coolly and easily and it is almost impossible for them to be truthful on a consistent basis. Can create, and get caught up in, a complex belief about their own powers and abilities. Extremely convincing and even able to pass lie detector tests.
• Lack of Remorse, Shame or Guilt
  A deep seated rage, which is split off and repressed, is at their core. Does not see others around them as people, but only as targets and opportunities. Instead of friends, they have victims and accomplices who end up as victims. The end always justifies the means and they let nothing stand in their way.
• Shallow Emotions
  When they show what seems to be warmth, joy, love and compassion it is more feigned than experienced and serves an ulterior motive. Outraged by insignificant matters, yet remaining unmoved and cold by what would upset a normal person. Since they are not genuine, neither are their promises.
• Incapacity for Love
• Need for Stimulation
  Living on the edge. Verbal outbursts and physical punishments are normal. Promiscuity and gambling are common.
• Callousness/Lack of Empathy
  Unable to empathize with the pain of their victims, having only contempt for others’ feelings of distress and readily taking advantage of them.
• Poor Behavioral Controls/Impulsive Nature
  Rage and abuse, alternating with small expressions of love and approval produce an addictive cycle for abuser and abused, as well as creating hopelessness in the victim. Believe they are all-powerful, all-knowing, entitled to every wish, no sense of personal boundaries, no concern for their impact on others.
• Early Behavior Problems/Juvenile Delinquency
  Usually has a history of behavioral and academic difficulties, yet “gets by” by conning others. Problems in making and keeping friends; aberrant behaviors such as cruelty to people or animals, stealing, etc.
• Irresponsibility/Unreliability
  Not concerned about wrecking others’ lives and dreams. Oblivious or indifferent to the devastation they cause. Does not accept blame themselves, but blames others, even for acts they obviously committed.
• Promiscuous Sexual Behavior/Infidelity
  Promiscuity, child sexual abuse, rape and sexual acting out of all sorts.
• Lack of Realistic Life Plan/Parasitic Lifestyle
  Tends to move around a lot or makes all encompassing promises for the future, poor work ethic but exploits others effectively.
• Criminal or Entrepreneurial Versatility
  Changes their image as needed to avoid prosecution. Changes life story readily.

Sociopathic behavior indeed…this is what America has been reduced to.

Does this make anyone else’s spine crawl? “Be discreet”

It’s far too creepy, and what makes it even creepier is that all of us who take a plane, if we’re paying attention, follow these rules or something like them for ourselves.

But this:

“When you go through security, treat it like you’ve been pulled over for speeding,” advised Brett Snyder, who writes an online column about air travel at CrankyFlier.com. “Be polite, answer any reasonable questions, and just keep thinking about being done with it so you can move on with your life.”

is simply advising you to think and act like you’ve already been accused of breaking the law, and I thought this country was founded on concepts quite the opposite of that.

Hey, I could be mistaken, seems like lots of things are getting reinterpreted these days.