"Earlier this month, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the White House agreed to allow the executive branch to conduct dragnet interceptions of the electronic communications of people in the United States. They also agrred to 'immunize' phone companies from lawsuits charging that after 9/11 some companies collaborated with the governemnt to violate the Constitution and existing federal law...

"In the 1950s, during the sad perios known as the McCarthy era, one's political beliefs...served as a rationale for government monitoring.

"I was among those blacklisted for my political beliefs. My crime? I had signed petitions. Lots of them. I had signed on in opposition to Jim Crow laws and poll taxes and in favor of rent control and pacifism. Because the petitions were thought to be Communist-inspired, I lost my ability to work in televission and radio after refusing to say I had been 'duped' into signing my name to these causes.

"In the 1960s, the inequities in civil rights and the debate over the Vietnam war spurred social justice movements. The government's response? More surveillance. ...

In 1978, things changed. Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act....which placed national security investigations under a special court....

The Bush administration, however, tore apart that carefully devised legal structure and social compact. To make matters worse, after its intrusive programs were exposed, the white House and the Senate Intelligence Committee proposed a bill that legitimized blanket wiretapping without individual warrants. The legislation directly conflicts with the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.

Studs Terkel, NYT 10-29

"ISLAMOFACISM," Giuliani, Bush and Iran

"Consider for a moment, the implications of the fact that Rudy Giuliani is taking foreign policy advice from Norman Podhoretz, who wants us to start bombing Iran 'as soon as it is logistically possible.'

"The Islamofascists, he tells us, are well on their way toward creating a world 'shaped by their will and tailored to their wishes.' Indeed, 'Already, some observers are warning that by the end of the 21st century the whole of Europe will be transformed into a place to which they give the name Eurabia.'

"Do I have to point out that none of this makes a bit of sense?

For one thing, there isn't actually anything such as Islamofacism--it's not an ideology; it's a figment of the neocon imagination.

"...the claim that Iran is on the path to global domination is beyond ludicrous...we're talking about a country with roughly the GDP of Connecticut and a government whose military budget is roughly the same as Sweden's.

"...the idea that bombing will bring the Iranian regime to its knees... is pure wishful thinking. Last year Israel tried to cripple Hezbollah with an air campaign, and ended up strengthening it instead.

"Mr. Podhoretz is engaging in what my relatives call crazy talk. Yet he is being treated with respect by the front-runner for the GOP nomination...

"All of this would be funny if it weren't so serious.

"In the wake of 9/11 the Bush administration adopted fear-mongering as a political strategy. Instead of treating the attack as what it was--an atrocity committed by a fundamentally weal, though ruthless adversary--the Administration portrayed America as a nation under threat from every direction...."

Paul Krugman NYT 10-29.

"Four years after his pointless invasion of Iraq, President Bush still confuses bullying with grand strategy. He refuses to do the hard work of diplomacy--or even acknowledge the disastrous costs of his actions. The Republican presidential candidates have apparently decided that the real commander-in-chief test is to see who can out-trash talk the White House on Iran....

The neocons pushing an attack on Iran admit that a prolonged bombing campaign would be necessary and would likely only delay Iran's program. But it is still worth it, they say, and if everybody gets lucky maybe the attacks will unleash that popular uprising against the mullahs they been promising for years.

That's the same kind of rose-petal thinking that was used to seel Americans a fantasy about the invasion of Iraq.

NYT Lead Editorial 10-29-07

In a reversal from past election cycles, Democratic candidates for president are outpacing Republicans in donations from the health care industry, even as the leading Democratic candidates offer proposals that have caused deep anxiety in some of its sectors.

Hospitals, drug makers, doctors and insurers gave candidates in both parties more than $11 million in the first nine months of this year...In all, the Democratic candidates have raised about $6.5 million from the industry, compared with nearly $4.8 millions for the Republican candidates. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York has amassed the most of any candidate...Mrs. Clinton received $2.7 million through the end of September, far more than Mitt Romney the Republican who raised the most from the health care industry, with $1.6 million...

Raymond Hernandez and Robert Pear in the NYT 10-29-07

The Federal Communications Commission, hoping to reduce the spiraling costs of cable television, is preparing to strike down thousands of contracts this week that gave individual cable companies exclusive rights to provide service to an apartment building, the agency's chairman says.

Stephen Labraton in the NYT 10-29-07

ONe of the most dispiriting causes of the biggest strategic blunder in Americna history may be the least understood: from the run-up to the Iraq War in 2002 until at least the 2006 elections, it wasn't the Rush Limbaughs and Ann Coulters who stampeded the chattering classes and liberal audiences toward our still-unfolding disaster. It was the "best" thinkers, writing in the New York Times Book Review and The New Republic, who cued the orchestra of high-minded opinion to play a medley of half-truths and hosannas in support of the war.

Before the first shot in the Iraq War was fired, it's intellectual supporters--Times Bood Review editor sam Tanenhaus, New Republic editor Peter Bein art and literary editor Leon Wieseltier; and writers paul Berman, Richard Brookhiser, David Brooks, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, Joe Klein, George Packer and Jacob Weisberg--struck preemptively at many who foresaw reruns of the Vietnam War's trumped-up pretexts, overkill and quagmires.

William Kristol, Weekly Standard editor, claimped the war's aftermath would require only 75,000 troops and $16 billion a year, and he accused dissenters of harming the democracy crusade, even after the Abu Ghraib guards, not war critics had demoralized the effort.

Yet intellectual hawks' assaults on leftists and liberals intensified in the Times Book Review and the New Republic.

As storm damage rose, the Times's Tanenhaus published a steady stream of put-downs of dissenters. Some critics were simply ignored: Al Gore's "The Assault on Reason" wasn't reviewed nor was former Harvard College dean Harry Lewis's "Excellence Without a Soul" which argues that liberal education at Lawrence Summers's Harvard was compromised by too much money, power and public relations. Others received prissy put-downs, as has Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman's "The Conscience of a Liberal in the October 21 Book Review. His "The Great Unravelling," too, got condescending treatment, from Peter Beinart in May 2003...We've had Berman sneering at Francis Fukuyama's apostasy from neoconservatism, Brooks lampooning an academic psychologist for urging Democrats to ge tough, Klein coronating Beinart's term-paperish "The Good Fight," Henry Kissinger coronating himself in a review about Dean Acheson and Bookhiser ruling that Hendrik Hertzberg's time had come.

Even when Beinart admitted in "The Good Fight" that he'd been wrong about the war, he leapt to cast Michael Moore as a greater danger to the Republic than Karl Rove.

As Iraq fell apart, the Book Review became a neoconservative damage-control gazette.

David Brooks, the liberals' favorite conservative, chided those who feared that "if we try to champion democracy in Iraq we will "only screw it up." Two years later, as we did screw it up, Brooks was writing, "Come on people, lets get a grip." By 2006 he was urging Americans to meet "savagery with savagery in Iraq" where insurgents "create an environment in which it is difficult to survive if you are decent."

The New Republic has become a half-way house for penitent hawks.

Excerpted from Jim Sleeper's article in The Nation Nov. 12, 2007.

Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale.

Yoko Ono is 74, happy, busy, watches her diet and in good health.

The senile, raving neocon lunatic, Norman Podhoretz, debated Fareed Zakaria on the Lehrer News Hour tonight over Podhoretz's agitating for Bush to Strike Iran before he leaves office. Podhoretz likened Iran to pre-world war II Nazi Germany and Zakaria, et al, to Neville Chamberlain. Zakaria pointed to the success of the U.S. longstanding policy of containment and deterrance which worked in the case of USSR, China and North Korea. He pointed out that Ahmadinejad is only a front man for the Ayatollah and that Iran has pursued, from it's viewpoint, a rational foreign policy although we don't like it. He failed to point out that the economy (GDP) of Iran is about the size of Connecticut's. Podhoretz opined that Bush will bomb Iran before he leaves office. Zakaria disagreed. It was a fascinating discussion which exposed one of the lunatic sources of Bush/Cheney's craziest policies.