The Byrds could have gotten lost in the shuffle between the Beatles and Bob Dylan. The Byrds were a little bit of both. They held their own during the 1960's, turning Dylan's folkie songs into rock classics through the Beatles' sense of melody. But the Byrds were not a cover band. The song below, Eight Miles High is one of the all time greats, capturing the spirit of the era. The video was made before anyone had the technology to make serious videos. Ignore the scotch tape holding together the special effects. Music doesn't get any better than this.

No one seriously expects that campaign coverage by the major U.S. media will focus on issues that actually matter to people. Health care, the environment, the economy, government-sponsored torture, war and peace, etc., are too boring for any extended debate, at least in the minds of the media. Instead, its about personality and scandal, real and imagined.

Anyone paying attention to public debate over the past month would have to wonder if the American political system has jumped off the cliff into a shitpile the size of the Rhode Island. This country is in very serious trouble. The environment has reached a tipping point that will destroy the ecosystem and make the lives of our children and grandchildren miserable and very, very difficult as global temperatures continue to rise and corporate interests further exploit and destroy our natural resources in the pursuit of profits. The war in Iraq will not end and no one knows how to get out of the castastrophic mess that George W. Bush and his foolish supporters in Congress dragged this country into. The economy is stuck in a shitpile the size of Long Island as jobs continue to move overseas for cheap labor and the price of gas reaches once-unimaginable heights.

A national referendum on these and other issues would require a serious look at where we are and how we got there. Things will probably only get worse if we can't stare at ourselves in the mirror and do something about the cancerous growth that is staring back at us. There will be no national referendum this time around, just as we had none last time around.

Instead, the media is focusing on Barack Obama's associations, real or imagined. His religious pastor has given some incendiary speeches over the years. Obama is being held responsible for this. Obama sat on a Board of Directors with a former member of the Weather Underground, a violent group during the days of rage of the late 1960's and 1970's. This is all bullshit. Anyone in American politics who has any aspirations to higher office is going to associate with questionable people, if only to reach out to the broader community. And prior to the "scandal" over Rev. Wright's speeches, did anyone ever give a damn about a candidate's religious mentors?

The issue over Obama's relationship with Rev. Wright is borderline racist. Why are only blacks held to answer for their associations? Why is it that only black candidates have to repudiate the views of Louis Farrakahn? Although Rev. Wright blamed the United States for the 9/11 attacks (he said the chickens had come home to roost), Republican candidates associate with the same cast of characters. Rudy Giuliani ran for president this year as a 9/11 hero, yet he happily accepted the endorsement of Rev. Pat Robertson, who blamed 9/11 on our society's acceptance of gays and lesbians, among other things. Giuliani did not have to answer for his association with this lunatic. John McCain solicited the endorsement of a nutjob, Rev. Hagee, who doesn't like Catholics and said that the hurricane decimated New Orleans because of our acceptance of gays and lesbians.

As I was writing this, a columnist for the New York Times focused on this theme, asking why Obama is being raked over the coals while Republicans get a free pass for their questionable associations. Describing a video of Rev. Hagee's speeches, columnist Frank Rich notes:

the Rev. John Hagee, lecturing in front of an enormous diorama. Wielding a pointer, he pokes at the image of a woman with Pamela Anderson-sized breasts, her hand raising a golden chalice. The woman is “the Great Whore,” Mr. Hagee explains, and she is drinking “the blood of the Jewish people.” That’s because the Great Whore represents “the Roman Church,” which, in his view, has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust.

John McCain sought out Rev. Hagee's endorsement. The columnist Frank Rich says there is a double standard for black politicians, and there is. John McCain embraced a man whose unlawful war killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and over 4,000 American soldiers, President Bush. Isn't it worse to associate with a killer like President Bush than Rev. Wright? The shocking reality is that no one is asking this question.

The Times over the weekend further noted this campaign's resemblance to the 1988 presidential campaign. For those too young to remember, George H.W. Bush ran against Democrat Michael Dukakis by attacking his patriotism. In particular, as governor of Massachusetts, Dukakis, who went to Harvard Law School, would not endorse a law requiring school teachers to lead their children in the pledge of alllegiance. As the Times points out, "He did so on the basis of an advisory opinion from the state court, which said the legislation was unconstitutional." So the governor will not sign a law that violates the Constitution. No matter to the Republican establishment, which knows that most Americans will not appreciate the finer points of Dukakis' objections. Attack his patriotism, ignore the issues, get elected and allow the country to rot further. George W. Bush and the modern Republican establishment has learned a lot from their elders.

A funny thing happened in the Federal courts last week, which few people noticed other than the gun nuts and constitutional lawyers: the Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled that Congress had the right to pass a law which would automatically dismiss any lawsuit brought against the gun industry for knowingly selling guns that would end up on the black market.

Guns are the bane of our existance. More people are dead from gunshots than any of us can bear. We read in the paper all the time about innocent victims of stray bullets, armed robberies, accidental shootings and stick-ups. What gives? Our society loves guns. That was the point of Michael Moore's film, "Bowling for Columbine."

The gun problem can be easily corrected, in several ways. First, strict gun control with strict background checks. Second, hold the gun industry responsible for its knowing distribution of lethal weapons into the hands of the worst scumbags society has to offer. New York City tried the second route, bringing a lawsuit against the gun industry. According to the Court of Appeals, "The City claimed that the Firearms Suppliers market guns to legitimate buyers with the knowledge that those guns will be diverted through various mechanisms into illegal markets."

Specifically, the lawsuit claimed the following:

Defendants have reason to know or should know that (a) some of the firearms they manufacture and/or distribute will be diverted into the hands of those who would violate the law, and (b) they could take steps to reduce the number of firearms that fall into the hands of criminals by changing their merchandising practices.

Reasonable measures are available to ensure that the guns sold and distributed by defendants do not find their way into a secondary illegal market.

Defendants could, but do not, monitor, supervise or regulate the sale and distribution of their guns by their downstream distributors or deal-customers. Defendants could, but do not, monitor, supervise or train distributors or dealers to avoid sales that feed the illegal secondary market. Defendants make no effort to determine those distributors and dealers whose sales disproportionately supply the illegal secondary market.

The case also asserted that "The United States leads the world in the number of people and in the number of children who die and are injured each year by guns. The yearly toll of several thousand persons killed compares to no more than a few hundred per year in every other industrialized country. A teenager in the United States is more likely to die from a gunshot wound than from all natural causes combined."

That lawsuit was chugging along when Congress decided that cases like this were bad for America. To protect the gun makers, Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. Of course, George W. Bush, the Texas cowboy, signed that bill into law in 2005. That meant that lawsuits like the one brought by New York City were in jeopardy unless the City could find a loophole in the law to keep the case going. It couldn't find any such loophole, and the Court of Appeals ruled that this lawsuit has to be dismissed.

Very few industries in this country get favorable treatment from the government like the gun industry. Is there a macho strand in the national DNA that compels normal people to fall in love with the one instrument that can cause instant death, even by accident? What does it say about a society that lets the cat of the bag in allowing millions of guns to circulate into the hands of God knows what? Once the guns are in the wrong hands, you can't get them back. Anyone with a brain will tell you this would be a very different country without guns. Probably a lot safer.

Guns will never become an issue any national political campaign except to the extent candidates fall over themselves in promising to the gun nuts that they will protect the proverbial "right to bear arms" and that they themselves fondly remember going hunting with their fathers and uncles when they were little. Guns are like the Bible. Some voters will not support your candidacy if you come out against gun ownership and promote strict gun control.

The silver lining about guns was that the Supreme Court has never ruled that the "right to bear arms" in the Second Amendment actually endorses a right to own a gun. This may sound strange to people who only know the Second Amendment to refer to the "right to bear arms." But that's not what the Amendment really says. It says this:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed

What the hell does this mean? No one knows. There are too many commas, too many clauses, for any one phrase in the Second Amendment to have any meaning that makes sense in the context of other provisions of the Amendment. Used to be that scholars believed it did not protect any individual right but a collective public right to have a militia, such as the National Guard.

The Supreme Court is about the re-interpret the Second Amendment to protect some kind of individual gun ownership. We know this because the Supreme Court heard oral argument a few weeks ago in a case arising from Washington DC, a city rife with gun violence. The City banned handguns: "This law restricts residents from owning handguns, excluding those grandfathered in by registration prior to 1975 and those possessed by active and retired law enforcement officers. The law also requires that all firearms including rifles and shotguns be kept "unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock."

The gun nuts who want the Second Amendment re-interpreted immediately challenged the Washington DC law, claiming that it violates the Constitution. The general sense is that the Supreme Court, with its recent George W. Bush appointees, is going to find in their favor. A court that has been scaling back individual rights over the last several decades is going to have to jump through hoops to find that the vaguely worded Second Amendment gives you the right to own a gun. The Supreme Court's expanded interpretation of the Second Amendment will likely be issued at the end of June. The presidential candidates will avoid any criticism of the anticipated Supreme Court decision the way that the rest of us would tiptoe around a loaded pistol sitting on the kitchen table.

The New York Times over the weekend had a lengthy article revealing that the Pentagon has been briefing retired military officers who provided opinions as "independent" analysts on television news. You've seen these guys: when the news covers the war, they bring out a retired general who talks about the Iraq war from the standpoint of an expert. Since these military officers don't work for the government anymore, they don't have to toe the party line. But they do, and several of them admitted that, during the briefings, the Pentagon gave them misleading information which the officers then repeated on television. Another reason why television news is worthless.

Here's the short version of this story:

A major article by David Barstow in the Sunday edition of The New York Times rips the veil off a Pentagon effort to promote its views, and those of the White House, via the press by the use of so-called "military experts," usually retired officers.

"To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as 'military analysts' whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world," Barstow writes.

"Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

"The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

"Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized."

The article admits that the Times itself published nine op-eds by the "propaganda analysts."

Although the article focuses on their TV work, the Times and every other major paper has long quoted some of these analysts in their news pages.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

An interesting sidenote: publication of the story was delayed because the government dragged its feet in producing relevant documents pursuant to the New York Times' legitimate requests. The government provided the records after a court threatened it with sanctions. According to the reporter who covered this story:

This article would have come sooner, but it took us two years to wrestle 8,000 pages of documents out of the Defense Department that described its interactions with network military analysts. We pushed as hard as we could, but the Defense Department refused to produce many categories of documents in response to our requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act. We ultimately sued in federal court, yet even then the Pentagon failed to meet several court-ordered deadlines for producing documents. Last week, the judge overseeing our lawsuit threatened the Defense Department with sanctions if it continues to defy his deadlines for producing additional records.

What's the best way to kill a man? In the caveman days, they clubbed you on the head. Later on, they got you by firing squad, but no one wanted to clean up the blood, so someone invented the electric chair. That wasn't good enough, either. The body shakes and goes into convulsions and even the executioner feels sorry for the deadly killer. So lethal injection was devised as a "humane" alternative. That was good enough for the state-sponsored executioners, and today it's good enough for the Supreme Court, which upheld lethal injections as consistent with the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and inhumane punishment.

A judge once told me that he thought that Supreme Court decisions were too long. He wasn't kidding. The case upholding lethal injections consists of 97 pages, including dissenting opinions. Very few people will read the whole case. Taken from the summary of the court ruling (with some modifications for readability), here's the gist (which got three votes on the Court):

1. The legal conclusions that got the most votes on the 9-member court are that "To constitute cruel and unusual punishment, an execution method must present a 'substantial' or 'objectively intolerable' risk of serious harm. A State’s refusal to adopt alternative procedures may violate the Eighth Amendment only where the alternative procedure is feasible, readily implemented, and in fact significantly reduces a substantial risk of severe pain." And, "Because some risk of pain is inherent in even the most humane execution method, if only from the prospect of error in following the required procedure, the Constitution does not demand the avoidance of all risk of pain."

2. Properly administered, the lethal injection is not likely to cause substantial pain. Sure, if someone screws up the process, lethal injection is like torture, and the Supreme Court has said that certain means of capital punishment, like torture and beheading, are unconstitutional. That risk is minimized where States use lethal injections."The Court has held that an isolated mishap alone does not violate the Eighth Amendment, because such an event, while regrettable, does not suggest cruelty or a “substantial risk of serious harm.'"

If you want the good stuff in a Supreme Court opinion, you can read the summary of the ruling at the start of the decision and then jump straight to the separate opinions of the Court's most conservative members, Justices Thomas and Scalia, who believe that the Constitution can only be interpreted by figuring out what the drafters were thinking in the late 1700s, when the Constitution was written. I am not kidding about this. This is called original intent jurisprudence. I refer to Justices Thomas and Scalia as "the good stuff" not because I like what they stand for (I don't) but because you can't believe what you are reading and hope to the Holy God that another Republican doesn't get elected in 2008 who can appoint more guys like this.

Justice Thomas thinks that the purpose of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment is directed at sadistic torture in the form of death penalty punishments, like disemboweling the killer or burning him at the stake. That's how they did in centuries ago, and of course those methods are frowned upon today, as they apparently were when the Constitution was written. He thinks that the best way to look at these cases is to disregard any risk analysis, i.e., whether there is a substantial risk of severe pain, which is the analysis adopted by the three Justices who wrote the main opinion. He writes:

I reject as both unprecedented and unworkable any standard that would require the courts to weigh the relative advantages and disadvantages of different methods of execution or of different procedures for implementing a given method of execution. To the extent that there is any comparative element to the inquiry, it should be limited to whether the challenged method inherently inflicts significantly more pain than traditional modes of execution such as hanging and the firing squad.

In other words, if lethal injection did create a substantial risk of serious pain, that would be legal under the Constitution, at least according to Justices Thomas or Scalia. The good news is that Thomas and Scalia are in the minority on issues like this, as even the other conservative members of the Court reject their far-out views.

The good news is that an encouraging opinion issued in this ruling by Justice Stevens suggests that the death penalty should be discarded as a means of punishment. He writes:

I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty represents “the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes. A penalty with such negligible returns to the State [is] patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment violative of the Eighth Amendment.”

But the bad news is that Justice Stevens is in his 80's and he won't be around forever. The next president will appoint his replacement. It is highly unlikely in this political climate that any president, Democrat or Republican, will appoint someone to the Supreme Court who opposes the death penalty.

Maybe the best political columnist in America is Bob Herbert of the New York Times. And Bob says it better than I can: we are a dysfunctional nation. Nothing works, everything is broken, nobody cares. We can't rebuilt New Orleans, we can't rebuild the World Trade Center, we can't stop the war, but for some reason we can timely build a new Yankee Stadium.

April 12, 2008 Op-Ed Columnist Losing Our Will By BOB HERBERT

I wonder what the answers would be if each American asked himself or herself the question: “How is the war in Iraq helping me?”

While the U.S. government continues to pour precious human treasure and vast financial resources into this ugly war without end, it is all but ignoring deeply entrenched problems that are weakening the country here at home.

On the same day that President Bush was announcing an indefinite suspension of troop withdrawals from Iraq, the New York Times columnist David Leonhardt was telling us a sad story about how the middle class has fared during the Bush years.

The economic boom so highly touted by the president and his supporters “was, for most Americans,” said Mr. Leonhardt, “nothing of the sort.” Despite the sustained expansion of the past few years, the middle class — for the first time on record — failed to grow with the economy.

And now, of course, we’re sinking into a nasty recession.

The U.S., once the greatest can-do country on the planet, now can’t seem to do anything right. The great middle class has maxed out its credit cards and drained dangerous amounts of equity from family homes. No one can seem to figure out how to generate the growth in good-paying jobs that is the only legitimate way of putting strapped families back on their feet.

The nation’s infrastructure is aging and in many places decrepit. Rebuilding it would be an important source of job creation, but nothing on the scale that is needed is in sight. To get a sense of how important an issue this is, consider New Orleans.

The historian Douglas Brinkley, who lives in New Orleans, has written: “What people didn’t yet fully comprehend was that the overall disaster, the sinking of New Orleans, was a man-made debacle, resulting from poorly designed levees and floodwalls.”

We could have saved the victims of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, but we didn’t. And now, more than 2 ½ years after the tragedy, we are still unable to lift the stricken city off its knees.

Other nations can provide health care for everyone. The United States cannot. In an era in which a college degree is becoming a prerequisite for a middle-class quality of life, we are having big trouble getting our kids through high school. And despite being the wealthiest of all nations, nearly 10 percent of Americans are resorting to food stamps to maintain an adequate diet, and 4 in every 10 American children are growing up in families that are poor or near-poor.

The U.S. seems almost paralyzed, mesmerized by Iraq and unable to generate the energy or the will to handle the myriad problems festering at home. The war will eventually cost a staggering $3 trillion or more, according to the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. When he was asked on “Democracy Now!” about who is profiting from the war, he said the two big gainers were the oil companies and the defense contractors.

This is the pathetic state of affairs in the U.S. as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Whatever happened to the dynamic country that flexed its muscles after World War II and gave us the G.I. Bill, the Marshall Plan, the United Nations (in a quest for peace, not war), the interstate highway system, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the finest higher education system the world has known, and a standard of living that was the envy of all?

America’s commanding general in Iraq, David Petraeus, and our ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, went up to Capitol Hill this week but were unable to give any real answers as to when the U.S. might be able to disengage, or when a corner might be turned, or when a faint, flickering hopeful light might be glimpsed at the end of the long, horrific Iraqi tunnel.

A country that used to act like Babe Ruth now swings like a minor-leaguer. The all-American can-do philosophy has been smothered by the hapless can’t-do performances of the people who have been in charge for the past several years. It’s both tragic and embarrassing.

The war in Iraq stands like a boulder in the road, blocking progress on so many other important issues that are crucial to our viability as a society. We’ve seen this before. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which included the war on poverty, was crippled by the war in Vietnam.

On the evening of April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. went into Riverside Church in Manhattan and said of the war in Vietnam: “This madness must cease.”

Forty-one years later, we can still hear the echo of Dr. King’s call. The only sane response is: “Amen.”

The Rolling Stones are in the news this week. A new concert documentary covers their world tour a few years ago. The documentary is newsworthy because cinema great Martin Scorsese is directing it. The excitement over this news obscures this reality: the Rolling Stones have not issued a a great album since 1972's Exile on Main Street. That album capped an eight-year run that only the Beatles could match.

Don't waste your money on a documentary showing the Stones playing the same songs they mastered 40 years ago. If you want to see the real Rolling Stones, when they could still write songs and reign supreme over the competition, click below. The video clip below was created by a fan because the record companies were not focusing on videos in 1966. The album that year was Aftermath, a masterpiece that does not contain any of the songs that really made the Stones famous, like Satisfaction or Jumpin' Jack Flash. But Aftermath captures the Stones at a time when they were moving from straight blues towards late 1960's decadence. Aftermath brings us right in the middle of that transition.

Unless you are a Stones freak, you don't know the song below, "Think." Listen to the opening guitar sound, and the fuzz-tone. And the riff as a whole. Just listen to the whole thing. This was the sound of 1966.

I have said it before and I'll say it again. We as a country hit rock bottom when the Bush administration began using torture in the post-9/11 world. International law makes it illegal to use torture, and experts believe that nothing good will come out of any torture session because the victim will say anything to stop the excruciating pain. Our use of torture can only result in reciprocal torture against American soldiers.

News is emerging that torture was approved by the highest levels of the Bush administration. Makes sense. President Bush is too dumb to know any better, and he is being advised by some very malignant people, like the Vice President. The tragedy of September 11 is now being used as an excuse to justify anything, anything at all, like the foolish Iraq war, saber-rattling against Iran, the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars for the Iraq quagmire, and torture.

This week, the media reported that the "torture memos" written by the Bush administration's highest-ranking lawyer suggested in 2003 that laws against torture cannot trump the President's war-time powers. The New York Times story is below. This argument only encourages a constitutional dictatorship, where the President can exempt himself from any laws that he chooses. Apparently, the government's analysis in this regard is not limited to the Iraq war. It is now American foreign policy. In the late-1970's, a disgraced Richard M. Nixon told an interviewer, in words and substance, "When the President does it, that means it's not illegal." This is why Nixon resigned: he was a pathological criminal with zero conscience who bombed and killed hundreds of thousands of people during the Vietnam war and subverted the U.S. Constitution in covering up the Watergate crime. Bush is the new Nixon. Whatever he does is legal. No questions asked.

Is the Bush administration ashamed at these relevations? No. One of the war planners, Douglas Feith, said that only "assholes" are worried about torture. Feith, with blood on his hands and one-way ticket to the flames of hell for promoting the Iraq war, a killer who easily could been a serial killer in another lifetime, has been rewarded with a distinguished university professorship.

Memo Sheds New Light on Torture Issue By DAVID JOHNSTON and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — A newly disclosed Justice Department legal memorandum, written in March 2003 and authorizing the military’s use of extremely harsh interrogation techniques, offers what could be a revealing clue in an unsolved mystery: What responsibility did top Pentagon and Bush administration officials have for abuses committed by American troops at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and in Afghanistan; Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; and elsewhere?

Some legal experts and advocates said Wednesday that the document, written the month that the United States invaded Iraq, adds to evidence that the abuse of prisoners in military custody may have involved signals from higher officials and not just irresponsible actions by low-level personnel.

The opinion was written by John C. Yoo of the Office of Legal Counsel, the executive branch’s highest authority on the interpretation of the law. It told the Pentagon’s senior leadership that inflicting pain would not be considered torture unless it caused “death, organ failure or permanent damage,” and it is the most fully developed legal justification that has yet come to light for inflicting physical and mental pressure on suspects.

While resembling an August 2002 memorandum drafted largely by Mr. Yoo, the March 2003 opinion went further, arguing more explicitly that the president’s war powers could trump the law against torture, which it said could not constitutionally be enforced if it interfered with the commander in chief’s orders.

The New York Times over the weekend published a book review about the Iraq war, called "The War on Error." The book is highly critical of the way the Bush administration planned and managed the Iraq war. What makes the book unique is that the author, Charles Ferguson, supported the war when it began in 2003. It's now 2008 and the war is raging on. The review only confirms what many of us have been saying for quite some time: the collosal disaster that is the Iraq war represents what has to be the greatest policy disaster of our lifetimes.

According to the review, the book in part talks about the logistical failures of the war.

No End in Sight” reads like a primer on incompetence, a catalog of bungling. “There were 500 ways to do it wrong, and two or three ways to do it right,” Bodine tells Ferguson. “What we didn’t understand is that we were gonna go through all 500.”

Doing it wrong started with the looting. This wasn’t a matter of thieves walking off with toasters and television sets. What happened in Baghdad was of an entirely different magnitude, a descent into nihilism that lasted for weeks, even months. Stores, schools, hospitals were destroyed; at least 16 of 23 government ministries were gutted. Organized criminals brought in industrial cranes to haul off parts of a power plant. Yet the instructions from Washington were not to interfere. “Freedom’s untidy,” Rumsfeld intoned. The result was a loss of Iraqi trust that has never been regained.

But the book highlights a larger problem. According to many experts who don't like the war, we cannot simply pull out all the troops:

And if the Americans withdraw? Most of the people Ferguson talked to believe the result would be full-scale civil war; one analyst speaks of three or four civil wars at once. Even some of those who favor withdrawal accept the likelihood of a blood bath. “You would see the Sunnis of Baghdad certainly getting finished off quick,” says one. Another, an American specialist on democracy and development obviously wearied by Iraq, says the mere threat of withdrawal might bring the rival factions together, but if not, “they can have their civil war.”

It’s not that simple, however. A bloody civil war, several experts observe, probably would not be limited to Iraq. Neighboring countries would almost inevitably be drawn in, and the entire region could be engulfed in chaos. Iran would support the Shiites, while Saudi Arabia, Jordan and possibly Egypt would back the Sunnis. Turkey, meanwhile, might become more deeply enmeshed in Iraq’s Kurdish areas. Juan Cole, a historian at the University of Michigan, was an influential opponent of the war who now opposes a pullout. He’s not the only one. Cole points out that a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia could endanger the world’s oil supplies. “Iraq is not like Vietnam, where the U.S. could withdraw precipitately and altogether and let the chips fall where they may. ... The U.S. has destabilized the cockpit of the world economy. The plane is now spiraling down.”

This country f*cked up the Iraq war so badly that our withdrawal could ignite the Middle East, creating a cataclysmic fire straight from the Bible. I'm no military expert, so I can't say what to do about the war at this point. But basic principles of accountability make it clear in my mind what should happen. You don't screw up a policy initiative without being held accountable. If you erase your company's entire hard drive by accident, you get fired. If you try to burn your school to the ground, you get expelled. If you commit a crime, you go to jail. If you start a bogus war that kills 4,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, flushes hundreds of billions of dollars down the toilet and makes this country less safe by creating more and more terrorists, here's what should happen: you should be dragged from the White House, put on trial for war crimes and impeached.

I really shouldn't have to say this, but one of the hallmarks of a democratic society is the consent of the governed. Public officials do what the public wants, unless there is good reason to take a different path, in which case public officials have to explain themselves and persuade the public to go along with them.

On minor issues, maybe it doesn't matter what the public thinks. But on war and peace it damned sure does. The public has been against the Iraq war for years, yet it rages on, consuming hundreds of billions of dollars, and the lives and limbs of thousands of American soldiers. Vice President Cheney knows this, but managing a war is too much fun without having to worry about the ignorant masses. He gave an interview recently in which he was asked about public opposition to the war.

CHENEY: On the security front, I think there’s a general consensus that we’ve made major progress, that the surge has worked. That’s been a major success.

RADDATZ: Two-third of Americans say it’s not worth fighting.

CHENEY: So?

RADDATZ So? You don’t care what the American people think?

CHENEY: No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.

The cold text of the interview does not capture the true flavour of Cheney's response. To really take it in, click below. Check out the smirk when Cheney said, "So?" This is the response of a sociopath who has long abandoned any sense of accountability in a democratic society.

The New York Times had an article in its magazine over the weekend about U.S. military personnel fleeing to Canada because they don't want to fight in the Iraq war. The point of the article is that

the Canadian House of Commons is slated to debate a resolution that would allow conscientious objectors “who have refused or left military service related to a war not sanctioned by the United Nations” to apply for residency in Canada. The phrasing is vague but the intent is not. The war in question is the Iraq war, and the resolution represents the culmination of a four-year debate about what to do with the small but steady stream of American soldiers who have fled across our northern border to avoid fighting in Iraq.

The Canadian government is taking up this measure because human rights lawyers in Canada are unable to show that American war resisters are "refugees" under Canadian immigration law. When things don't work out in the courts, turn to the legislature to pass a law.

During the Vietnam war, Americans fled to Canada to avoid the draft. Canada took in these young man, some of whom certainly would have been killed or maimed had they been drafted to Vietnam. Since we don't learn from our mistakes, this country is mired in another quagmire that we can't get out of. The difference is that there is no draft this time around. But American soldiers still have to follow orders or face severe punishment for refusing to return to Iraq for another tour of duty. According to the article, quoting a soldier named Justin Colby,

Most of the [war resisters] say they joined the military in part out of patriotism. “I thought Iraq had something to do with 9/11,” Colby says, “that they were the bad guys that attacked our country.” But unlike Hinzman, most did not apply for conscientious-objector status. They tend to say they aren’t opposed to all wars in principle — just to the one they were ordered to fight. It wasn’t until Colby arrived in Iraq that he started to see the conflict as “a war of aggression, totally unprovoked,” he says. “I was, like, ‘This is what my buddies are dying for?’ ” Midway through his tour, he decided: “I’m never going to do this again.” He went AWOL the day before his unit left to train for a second deployment. [Colby's lawyer] House says that more than two-thirds of his clients have been deployed to Iraq at least once. “One is resisting a third deployment.”

There's an old saying in American law: just because something is unfair does not mean it's illegal. Sometimes we hear a variation on that: just because something is not fair does not mean it violates the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, the Constitution protects fewer rights than you might think. Once you get past free speech, freedom of religion and rules guaranteeing criminal suspects a fair trial, it's slim pickings.

Isn't there anything in the Constitution that allows a soldier to back out of his commitment for a war that he no longer supports? Actually, a cold reading of the Constitution would help these soldiers. It's in the Thirteenth Amendment, enacted after the civil war as a means to help the freed slaves. That provision reads:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

That's right: slavery or other forms of involuntary servitude are illegal. You can't force someone to do things against their will. So doesn't the Thirteenth Amendment prevent the government from mandatory military service? The answer is no. In the case of Butler v. Perry (1916), "The Supreme Court . . . ruled that the Thirteenth Amendment does not prohibit mandatory military service in the United States."

In that case, the Supreme Court reasoned:

The 13th Amendment declares that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist. This Amendment was adopted with reference to conditions existing since the foundation of our government, and the term 'involuntary servitude' was intended to cover those forms of compulsory labor akin to African slavery which, in practical operation, would tend to produce like undesirable results. It introduced no novel doctrine with respect of services always treated as exceptional, and certainly was not intended to interdict enforcement of those duties which individuals owe to the state, such as services in the army, militia, on the jury, etc.

Despite its broad language prohibiting involuntary servitude, the Supreme Court in 1916 interpreted it narrowly, finding that it does not cover military conscription. That case is still binding today, because the Supreme Court has not overruled it. But that does not mean that the Supreme Court cannot overrule this precedent. It does that all the time. As I write this, the Supreme Court is poised to re-interpret the Second Amendment to make it much more difficult for the government to enact gun control laws. In order to do this, the Supreme Court would have to overturn or seriously modify one of its rulings from 1939 which ruled that the Second Amendment only covered the rights of a state militia.

The problem with the Second Amendment is that it's poorly worded. It reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." No one knows what this language means. There are too many commas and it does not conclusively tell you who enjoys this right. True, the Second Amendment makes reference to "the right to bear arms." But in the same sentence, it makes reference to "A well regulated militia." The Supreme Court might say that the Second Amendment covers both the rights of a militia AND the right to bear arms as a citizen. That would be a compromise finding, and it would certainly reflect an expansive reading of individual liberties, provided your idea of freedom is carrying a pistol.

If the Supreme Court is willing to creatively interpret the Second Amendment to guarantee the right to carry a handgun to defend yourself, why won't it interpret the Thirteenth Amendment to prevent the government from forcing people to fight in a war they don't support? Is there anything more coercive than forcing someone to be a soldier, taking away from their homes and their families to risk life and limb in a foreign land with the possibility of death? I don't think so. It's a sad commentary that decades of pressure from the National Rifle Association and other guns-rights groups has compelled the Supreme Court to re-consider one of its precedents on the Second Amendment, but no one is clamoring for a re-interpretation of the Thirteenth Amendment to include forced military conscription.

This time of year we read once again the commentary about another Iraq war anniversary. When the bombs began falling five years ago this week, no one thought that the war would extend into a sixth year. These days, no one knows when it will end.

The cost of war is many-fold. News accounts this week predict that the 4,000th U.S. fatality is around the corner, and economic forecasters are predicting that the war will cost the U.S. taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe a trillion dollars, including costs for veterans' care and other financial obligations resulting from war. Many of these financial obligations do not land at our feet until many years later, when our grandchildren will have to pay the bill, just as I am now footing the bill for the long-term costs of the Vietnam War, which ended more than 30 years ago.

As our grandchildren pay for Gulf War II, they may very well be fighting a war of their own. Except that it may not be "their" war any more than the current Iraq War is "my" war. No matter. If our political culture remains the same 30 years from now, our grandchildren will have no greater control over issues of war and piece than we did. That's because, when it comes to war and peace, American citizens have no real control over their destiny.

The best way to figure out why this war is entering its sixth year is to think about how American society celebrates war, and how we are condititioned to support war. Elementary school students are taught to be "patriotic" without any real understanding of what that word means. You know patriotism when you see it. The kid who sits down during the Pledge of Allegience is not patriotic. The kid who waves the flag is patriotic. More broadly, few people associate anti-war protesters as patriotic. Patriotism is reserved for this who support war, any war. No one who supports war or an aggressive foreign policy is "anti-American." That epithet is reserved for people who ask too many questions. The assumption is that our government fights wars and intervenes abroad with honorable motives.

There is no risk in being "patriotic." Others may disagree with you, but to articulate pro-war views will not make you stand out. It's the anti-war protesters who have to apologize, telling TV cameras and passersby that they support the troops but not the war, or that their fathers fought in World War II but they have a duty as citizens to speak out against the current war. Why are anti-war protesters so apologetic? Because pro-war, pro-military views are the default position. It's "pro-American."

And why not? We celebrate "war heroes," not "peace heroes." War heroes get statues and buildings named after them. Who are the peace heroes? We do not recognize any. When the country goes to war, the TV news will hire retired generals and other military officials to provide opinions about war strategy. It would never occur to the TV stations to present these views alongside those of peace activists, highly-educated and articulate individuals who oppose the war and provide running commentary about why this particular war is wrong and possibly in violation of international law. Can you imagine the uproar if a leftist anti-war activist spoke out against the war the night the bombs began falling on Baghdad?

Even when anti-war sentiment represents the majority of the population (the case today), the democratic process fails us. That's because of the pro-war mentality that's been ingrained in us since grade school. Retreating or withdrawing troops is considered cowardly or highly disfavored. "We have to finish the job," the pro-war crowd tells us. "Why do you hate America," the more rigid conservative will ask. Statements like this are among the reasons the Iraq War will not end. No one knows how to end it, even when we all agree that American troops are stuck in a civil war, someone else's dispute.

The democratic process fails us because in November 2006 the American people voted for Congressional candidates who opposed the war. The media celebrated that sea-change as a reflection of anti-war sentiment. More than a year later, we're still in Iraq. The President is in denial, growing dumber by the year. His hawkish Secretary of Defense was fired a day after the 2006 election, but his replacement charges full-speed ahead. Books upon books and magazine articles make it crystal clear that the war was sold on lies and cherry-picked intelligence, and smoking-gun evidence has emarged to show that the war is bogus, but the war rages on.

It is time for Americans to face reality. The U.S. political system may have some democratic qualities when it comes to enforcing popular opinion on domestic issues. But the public has almost no influence over foreign policy, even when the blood of our brothers and children are spilled and hundreds of billions of our tax dollars are wasted and thrown into the rabbit hole. Elected and appointed officials can do what they want, they can screw up war strategy and squander lives and untold billions of dollars, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.

Why is it that the average voter has no real influence on war and peace? Part of the answer lies in who runs for office. There may be many rational people in Congress who don't like the war, but probably many more got elected because openly anti-war candidates have no chance in many congressional districts. Relatedly, since the President can whip up war hysteria by picking and choosing which evidence will support his position, once the war starts, it's impossible to end it without "victory." Withrawing troops equals weakness. We have not yet reached that point in American society where we can cut our losses and walk away, asking the United Nations or some other peacekeeping body to take care of the problem.

The average voter also has no influence over war and peace because of the size of the federal war-making bureacracy, which includes the Department of Defense, the State Department and the intelligence agencies like the CIA. These agencies are huge, they employ thousands of people and consume billions of taxpayer dollars. Much of what they do is accomplished in secret. While the framers of the U.S. Constitution granted war-making authority to both Congress and the President, it's the President who presides over these agencies, not Congress. The constitutional framers had no idea that these departments and bureacracies would grow this large, and some of these agencies were created long after the Constitution was enacted.

Maybe the Constitution was not designed for this modern society where government has grown larger than anyone could have imagined, and with secret decisions being made all the time without any oversight, we don't even know what we don't know. The most important decisions of all are reached without little, if any, public input. The truth often comes out many years later, when secret records are de-classified and scholars piece them together. Past war crimes are written off as crimes of the past. We've learned our lessons and our government is more enlightened today. That mentality creates more wars, and more war dead coming home in wooden boxes, their families left to pick up the pieces.

This is why even an anti-war President will become a pro-war President immediately upon taking office. A new President will be afraid to pull out the troops and work on some other peacekeeping strategy. The war machine has too much invested in pursuing the war. Momentary downturns in U.S. casualties will produce optimistic pronouncements about our ability to "win" the war. That's happening right now as people think the "surge" is working. But an escalation in troops for an illegal war can never work. We're just throwing more gasoline on the fire.

A final reason why the Gulf war will not end is that the war-promoters continue to believe that the war can be won. It may be "won" as that word is defined by the establishment. But what does it mean to win the war? Killing off every last enemy soldier? And who is the enemy? Won't more enemies turn up the longer the war persists? Maybe we don't deserve to win a war that was unprovoked, against a country that did not attack us and had no intent to attack us. Do I have the right to beat up someone in the street for no reason? An unprovoked fight like this deserves no winners. Ultimately, the question of whether we deserve to win this war is the unanswered question that needs an answer. Until we can look that question in the mirror, then this war is only now getting its boots on.

The news of the day is that New York's Governor has been caught up in a sex scandal, the kind of sex scandal that we can't get enough of. Eliot Spitzer was a tough prosecutor who ran for governor as a reformer. Who knew that he was transporting a prostitute across state lines?

What intrigues me is that an unknown Lt. Governor is about to be annointed Governor once Spitzer resigns. I follow state government in New York, yet I know nothing about this replacement, David Paterson, except that he's a black man who is also legally blind. His life will change forever today.

The last time a Lt. Governor became governor was in the mid-1970's, when Nelson Rockefeller was named U.S. Vice President to replace Gerald Ford who became President when Richard Nixon resigned. The lucky duck in that instance was Malcolm Wilson, who served as Governor for two years. Today, the Tappan Zee Bridge in Westchester County is named after him. As I cross that bridge on a regular basis, I always look at the sign memorializing Malcolm Wilson. And I know that, every day, thousands of New York motorists ask themselves, "Who the &$%& is Malcolm Wilson?"

David Paterson is the Ringo Starr of New York politics. Yes, in some far-flung state like Nebraska or Idaho, the Lt. Governor can become Governor in circumstances like this, but who cares? This is New York! Every New York Governor becomes a media celebrity and a possible candidate for President. I'm sure that some of the bands in Liverpool changed drummers, but on the brink of superstardom, the Beatles gave that opportunity to Ringo, who in replacing Pete Best went from a lifetime of obscurity to the most recognizable drummer in rock history.

David Paterson may be a nice guy, but he's no Ringo. Maybe Paterson will reach the heights of greatness. Ringo did. In the early 1970's, after the Beatles broke-up, Ringo sang maybe the most beautiful of all Beatles solo songs, Photograph, co-written with George Harrison. The melody is all George, hooks and all. The lyrics are all Ringo, simple and direct. Ringo sings, and in its own way, his voice is beautiful. Without his last minute jump to the Beatles, Ringo may have lived his life in obscurity, teaching math at Liverpool High School.

The President has vetoed a law that makes it illegal for the CIA to engage in waterboarding. We have now hit rock-bottom. Waterboarding, by any definition, is torture. But as I have said before, The practice of waterboarding is against the law. breaking the law is not what it used to be.

We knew after 9/11 that things in the United States would change. We knew that war was around the corner and that civil liberties at home would be curtained. That certainly happened, though we got more war than we bargained for, $12 billion per month to be exact. But torture? We did not see that coming. At least I didn't.

Raw Story reports that, under a "warrantless surveillance mail prorgram," the government is closely monitoring thousands of pieces of mail in the United States without a court order. In addition, a Bush administration directive apparently allows the government to open the mail, as well. The story is below. This really should be an issue in the presidential campaign. True, the Republicans can spin this story in their favor by arguing that another terrorist attack will ensue without this kind of surveillance. But the Democrats can gain the moral high ground by arguing that it's not too hard to get a search warrant to review private information. That's kinda the purpose of having a Constitution in the first place.

Officials monitor thousands of letters without warrants 03/06/2008 @ 8:29 am Filed by John Byrne

The US postal service approves more than 10,000 requests from US law enforcement each year to record names, addresses and other information from the outside of packages, according to information released through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The warrantless surveillance mail program -- as it is known -- requires only the approval of the US Postal Inspection Service Director, and not a judge.

Since 1998, the inspector has approved more than 97% of requests during criminal inquiries, new documents show. According to USA Today, which filed the request, "In 2004, 2005 and 2006, the most recent year provided, officials granted at least 99.5% of requests."

"The idea of the government tracking that amount of mail is quite alarming," Director of the American Civil Liberties Union's national security project Jameel Jaffer told the paper. "When you realize that (the figure) does not include national security matters, the numbers are even more alarming."

Officials would not disclose how much mail was monitored in national security or "terror"-related investigations. Under the PATRIOT ACT, those who received letters notifying them that they were being investigated often were gagged from even reporting their being targeted.

Responding to a USA Today request for the national security-related data, "inspection service counsel Anthony Alverno wrote that even revealing the frequency of the surveillance would undermine its effectiveness "to the detriment of the government's national security interests."

There's reason to believe more mail may be being opened, as well.

In late 2006, a signing statement issued by President Bush suggested that his office had expanded executive branch power to open mail without a warrant.

The signing statement accompanied H.R. 6407, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, which reiterated a prohibition on opening first class mail without a warrant.

"In 1996, the postal regulations were altered to permit the opening of First Class mail without a warrant in narrowly defined cases where the Postal Inspector believes there is a credible threat that the package contains dangerous material like bombs," the ACLU said in a press release at the time. "Instead of referencing the narrow exception in the postal regulations, the president’s signing statement suggests that he is assuming broader authority to open mail without a warrant."

In January 2007, the ACLU and Center for National Security Studies filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking information regarding any additional warrantless mail surveillance.

A few weeks ago, a Federal judge shut down the Wikileaks website. The judge did this because this muckraking website, modeled after Wikipedia, published documents about a Swiss bank implicated in alleged moneylaundering. According to one published account, "The anonymous whistleblower site, devoted to battle against corruption and censorship, published several hundred documents from a Swiss banking whistleblower purportedly showing that Bank Julius Baer and its Cayman Islands subsidiary had been involved in offshore tax evasion and money laundering by extremely wealthy and, in some cases, politically sensitive clients from the US, Europe, China and Peru."

Wikileaks is a sign of the times. Today, everyone is a journalist. If you can get your hands on some incriminating documents, it's easy to put them online for all to see. In the 1970's, the Washington Post brought down a President in aggressively covering the Watergate scandal. In the new millenium, anyone else lucky enough to get the right news tip can achieve the same result.

What happened to Wikileaks? A Swiss bank sued Wikileaks over the unquthorized publication of these secret documents. A judge shut down the website. As the New York Times pointed out in editorializing against the Wikileaks shutdown, that's like closing down an entire newspaper because of one bad article. Shutting down Wikileaks means that all the smoking gun documents that it posts online are unavailable. This includes, among other things, documents revealing the U.S. rules of engagement for Iraq.

What makes the Wikileaks case different is that nothing really disappears online. Web pages are cached, or preserved, and mirror websites will copy the content no matter what happens to the Wikileaks site. But that's not the point. The Wikileaks page today looks like this. A small headline along the top of the web page says that "Wikileaks Has Been Unconstitutionally Censored!" In fact, the judge reversed himself the other day, basically changing his mind:

A federal judge on Friday withdrew his earlier order disabling a Web site that allows the anonymous posting of documents to discourage unethical behavior in governments and corporations.

On Feb. 15, the judge, Jeffrey S. White of Federal District Court in San Francisco, ordered the American address of the site, Wikileaks.org, to be disabled at the request of Bank Julius Baer & Company, a Swiss banking company, and its Cayman Islands subsidiary. They charged that Wikileaks had posted confidential, personally identifiable account information on some of the bank’s customers.

The judge’s action drew criticism — and court filings — from numerous organizations concerned that the order violated the First Amendment protection of free speech. Because Wikileaks operates sites, like Wikileaks.cx, in other countries, the documents were and are still widely available, both in the United States and elsewhere.

In reversing himself at a hearing here on Friday, Judge White acknowledged that the bank’s request posed serious First Amendment questions and might constitute unjustified prior restraint. He also appeared visibly frustrated that technology might have outrun the law and that, as a result, the court might not be able to rein in information once it had been disclosed online.

There is nothing more complicated in constitutional law than First Amendment doctrine. The guy on the street may tell you that free speech is free speech and censorship is illegal. But nothing is clear cut. Each time the First Amendment is implicated in a lawsuit, the court has to balance the interests of the government with the interests of the speaker. So that, in the classic case of incitement to riot, the government has a greater interest in suppressing the speech than the speaker has in yelling fire in a crowded theater. When government employees want to blow the whistle on their employers' unlawful or unethical activities, the court has to balance the interests of the government's need for an efficient workplace against the interests of the employee in blowing the whistle. Balancing tests in First Amendment law make it difficult to predict who will win the case.

But in the Wikileaks case, this was an easy call. There is no real balancing test when someone wants to shut down a newspaper or website. If the website is publishing classified or illegally-obtained documents, the court can order the website to take those documents offline. To shut down the entire website over some documents is like cutting off your head to stop the dandruff. I would like to meet this judge and ask what, if anything, he was thinking. I would also ask him what it feels like to be a national laughingstock. A first-year law student would know that shutting down Wikileaks was unprecedented.

The issue of whether the courts can censor the media was settled a long time ago. The answer is that the courts cannot do this. This is equally true in times of war. In the early 1970's, a brave government employee named Daniel Ellsberg smuggled secret documents relating to the Vietnam War and gave them to the New York Times and Washington Post. These newspapers published the documents, which became known as the Pentagon Papers. They revealed that the government had lied to the American people in prosecuting this war for over a decade and that the war was a lie. Confirmation that the Vietnam war was a sham was certainly jarring to the families of the nearly 60,000 American soldiers who died in that needless conflict.

The Nixon administration went to court to stop the newspapers from publishing the Pentagon Papers. The Supreme Court rejected that authoritarian stunt, ruling that the newspaper could publish these documents and that any other outcome would constitute a prior restraint, legalese for the notion that the government cannot stop speech before it happens.

The Pentagon Papers case stands a high point in the Supreme Court's protection of First Amendment liberties. Every school district should educated its students about that case and explain exactly what it means and the terrible consequences that would have ensued if the Supreme Court ruled the other way on that case. The Wikileaks case should also be taught in school. It should also be an issue in the Presidential campaign. The lesson in the Wikileaks case is that even one judge can crumple up the Constitutional with serious consequences for free speech and the dissemination of information.

As a masochist, I read conservative political blogs and also listen to conservative talk radio to see what the other side is up to. They are usually up to no good. The latest round of nonsense concerns attempts to demonize Barack Obama, now the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. There are reasons for this, not the least of which is that Republicans are stuck with John McCain, who has no charisma at all and is not a real conservative in the eyes of the radical right wing. So rather than rally round McCain, they are attacking Obama.

Attack anyone you want, I always say, so long as you focus on the issues. The problem is that our presidential elections do not concern themselves with the issues, that is, if you define issues as policy debates over war and peace, domestic priorities and the rest. No, our presidential elections focus on personality, which has almost nothing to do with governing. But it's a lot more fun that way.

Mud-slinging and other personal attacks have been with us for centuries. But, from my vantage point, politics took a sharp turn into the gutter in 1988, when Republican Vice President Bush (George W's father) ran against Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee. Bush was a man utterly without substance, a careerist who sought the presidency most of his adult life but did not really have the gravitas or even the resume for the job until Ronald Reagan plucked him from obscurity in 1980 and made him vice president, where he oversaw Reagan's horrific foreign policy for eight years and waited out the Reagan presidency for his own shot at the job in 1988.

Bush Sr. was known to have the best Rolodex in Washington. I guess no one uses Rolodexes anymore, but prior to the computer age, we had our phone numbers in a rotating device that stored our business cards and contact information which now gets programmed into the computer and our cell phones. As a high-profile vice president for eight years, Bush Sr. had a head start on his run for the presidency, with contacts from Maine to California, but those contacts were not enough. People thought Bush was a wimp, a terrible public speaker and an empty suit. He overcame those deficits with a presidential campaign that serves as a template for the current race.

Bush Sr. made the presidential campaign in 1988 all about personality. He attacked Dukakis as "soft on crime" and unpatriotic. It's easy to do this if you have a well-oiled publicity team at your disposal, and all Bush had to do was the hightlight Dukakis's tenure as governor of Massachusetts and his membership in the American Civil Liberties Union. Massachusetts is considered a liberal state, and, despite its role in advancing civil rights and liberties over the last century or so, the ACLU is deemed outside the mainstream by the anti-intellectual conservatives. Through the fall campaign that year, Bush Sr. claimed that Dukakis was a "card-carrying member of the ACLU," a subtle reference to the red scares of the 1950's, when demagogues claimed that certain liberals were "card-carrying communists." Bush Sr. also focused on the Pledge of Allegience, noting that Dukakis, a lawyer, vetoed an illegal proposal to force school children to give the Pledge every morning.

Without any serious discussion of any of the issues facing this country, Bush Sr. won the presidency in 1988. In retrospect, it's easy to see what we lost in this regard. The Soviet bloc collapsed a year later and the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, ending the Cold War once and for all. Two Supreme Court justices were appointed during the Bush presidency, and the economy slid down the chute as no one had any coherent plan to bring this country into the 1990's and the new century. The country went to war for the first time in a generation when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, and the Presidency rolled up his sleeves for that military action by invading Panama in 1989 and killing a few thousand people in the process. The monumental days of the Bush presidency (1989-1993) were preceded by a vacuous presidential campaign that did not give George H.W. Bush any mandate to run the country.

What have we learned from the pathetic 1988 presidential campaign? Nothing. Our campaigns are still devoid of substance and the pressing issues of the day -- war and peace, global warming, domestic priorities -- continue to get swept under the carpet. In 2000, the Republicans hacked away at Al Gore's presidential campaign by putting words in his mouth, reminding us over and over that he claimed to invent the Internet, something Gore never said he did. In 2004, the Republicans hacked away at John Kerry by promoting the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who misprepresented Kerry's military record and made him look like an opportunist and fake war hero. This kind of bullshit wins elections.

Take a look at what's happening now. Obama is emerging as the front-runner, so the right wing is taking the following pot-shots:

1. They are questioning Obama's patriotism. Take a look-see right here, where CNN actually asked its readers if Obama is sufficiently patriotic to serve as President. The reason for this question is that