Today's Stories

June 21 / 22, 2008

Chris Floyd
Torturegate

June 20, 2008

Robert Oscar Lopez
Brownout in Black Camelot: Obama and Latino Voters

Paul Craig Roberts
John Yoo, Totalitarian

Bouthaina Shaaban
The Real Arab AIPAC

Bill Quigley
The Big Lock-Up

Moshe Adler
Is Cuba Done With Equality?

Patrick Cockburn
An End to Iraq Contractor Immunity?

Andy Worthington
John McCain, Torture Puppet

Norman Solomon
Health Care and the Ghosts of War

Martha Rosenberg
Can Wyeth Fool American Women Twice?

June 19, 2008

Ralph Nader
Why Won't Corporations Take On Big Oil?

Chellis Glendinning
Techno-Fascism: Every Move You Make

Neve Gordon
Learning to Drive in Rafah

Dave Lindorff
Killing the News in Iraq

Sheldon Richman
Habeas Corpus Saved--Barely

George Bisharat
Obama's Missteps

Jackie Corr
Dear Mr. Kilowatt

Farzana Versey
Will Gorkhaland Become a Reality?

Website of the Day
Trouble on the Range

June 18, 2008

Nicole Colson
Hunger and Humiliation in the Belt-Tightening Economy

Rev. William E. Alberts
The "F" Word and the White Press

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Genuflections to the Swing Lobby

Parvez Ahmed
Oil Prices, Market Regulation and the Election

Bob Moss
Judicial Warfare in Boumediene

Dave Lindorff
The Elephant in the Room

David Wilson
Bush in London

June 17, 2008

Conn Hallinan
The Brain Trauma Vets

Wajahat Ali
Chomsky Speaks: On Iran and Iraq

Marjorie Cohn
Reviving Habeas Corpus

Uri Avnery
Two Professors: Mearsheimer and Walt in Israel

David Macaray
Adversarial Relationship

Rannie Amiri
Forgotten Lives in a Forgotten War

Website of the Day
Pentagon Money

June 16, 2008

Uri Avnery
An Apology

Corey D. B. Walker
The Racial Politics of Symbols

Howard Lisnoff
Files Upon Files

Dennis Loo
2008 Elections: Of Whales and Worms

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama and the Fall Into Tyranny

June 13 / 15, 2008

Douglas Valentine
McCain: War Hero or Go-To Collaborator?

Alexander Cockburn
Change, What Change?

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft

Peter Linebaugh
On Wat Tyler Day

Ishmael Reed
The Colossus: Sonny Rollins, Take One

Joe Bageant
Old Dogs and Hard Time

Harry Browne
Ireland Shows the Way!

Andy Worthington
The Supreme Court's Gitmo Decision: What Does It Mean?

Jeff Sharlet
The F-Word

Binoy Kampmark
They Gassed Us: Agent Orange in OZ

Alan Farago
His Little Piece of the Pie

Brian Cloughley
America the Detested: the Pakistan Airstrikes

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
How to Stretch Gasoline

Reza Fiyouzat
Oil and Racism

Patrick Bond /
Richard Kamidza
How Europe Underdevelops Africa

David Yearsley
Music in the Rubble

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Thank You, Dennis Kucinich!

Ronnie Cummins
Don't Panic; Go Organic

Dan Bacher
Bush Tries to Raid Salmon Disaster Funds

Michael Dickinson
Jesus in Megiddo Prison

Seth Sandronsky
My Father's World

Poets' Basement
Tu Fu / Rexroth

Website of the Weekend
Torture and the American Psyche

June 12, 2008

Judith Levine
As Cranes Fall and People Die

Patrick Cockburn
Amid Iraqi Fury, U.S. Offers Concessions on Military Bases

Saul Landau
The Iraq War Becomes Suicidal

Christopher Brauchli
Bush Bling-Bling: Government by Crony

Norman Solomon
Deadly Diplomacy

Helen Redmond
Why Can't We All Get KennedyCare?

Laura Carlsen
No Rest for the Working Poor

Jeremy R. Hammond
Threats Against Iran Escalate

Anne Landman
Pinkwashing: Can Shopping Cure Breast Cancer?

Website of the Day
Fire in Watts

June 11, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Oil Prices Are So High

Ralph Nader
Wall Street Gamblers

Joshua Frank
Why I Can't Support Barack Obama

Clifton Ross
Conversation in Miami: the Neoliberal Left and Socialism

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Whatever Happened to "Democracy Now?"

Stephen Lendman
Exposing Pentagon and CIA Corruption

Diane Farsetta
Talking Back to Bill O'Reilly

Ron Jacobs
The Sixties Painted Black

Deborah Rich
Hay Belly Nation: the FDA and the O-Word

Hop Wechsler
A Friend of Women? My Bill Clinton ... and Ours

Website of the Day
A New Path to the Waterfall

June 10, 2008

Alan Farago
John McCain and the Company He Keeps

James G. Abourezk
Deadly Fallout From Obama's Groveling Before Israel Lobby

Saree Makdisi
Banned in the U.S.A. (Almost)

Malini Johar Schueller
A Picture From Beirut

John Ross
Killing Foods, Killing People

Wajahat Ali
Rumi and Sufism

Peter Morici
Bernanke Aggravates Recession Risks

Jordan Flaherty
Inside Angola Prison, Louisiana's Last Slave Plantation

Gary Macfarlane
Collaboration on the Clearwater: Is It Legitimate?

Joanne Mariner
The Gitmo Trials: an Inglorious Start

Website of the Day
The End of the Clinton Machine?

June 9, 2008

Uri Avnery
No, I Can't: Obama, Israel and AIPAC

Nikolas Kozloff
McCain & the Republican Insitute: Promoting Iraqi Occupation for "a Million Years"

Allan Nairn
Drawing Your Last Breath Hungry

Dennis Loo
Threats on Iran and the "Batterer's Defense"

Harry Browne
Irish Euro Vote Comes Down to the Wire

C. Hand
U. S. Bid to Hike Iran's Gas Prices Seems Doomed

Peter Morici
An Unsustainable Trade Deficit

Kenneth Couesbouc
A Ripe Time for Inflation

Martha Rosenberg
The Inconvenient Senator Grassley

James L. Secor
Chinese Superstition or Unconscious Oracle?

Website of the Day
Pay Bo Diddley!

June 7 / 8, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Obama Goes Over the Top

Ishmael Reed
How Miles Davis Changed My Life

Jeffrey St. Clair
What a Miner's Life is Worth

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet the King the Beers: John McCain and Latin America

Dave Lindorff
The High Cost of a Single War-Like Remark: Oil Prices, Israel, Iran and the U.S.

Robert Fantina
When Truth is the Casualty

Conn Hallinan
Iran and Rumors of War

Neve Gordon
The Occupation and the Politics of Death

Tom Barry
The Deterrence Strategy of Homeland Security

Patrick Irelan
Raiding the Packing House

Tim Wise
Your Whiteness is Showing

David Ker Thomson
The Hard Question

Joshua Frank
"Socialist" Wins Republican Nomination in Montana

David Yearsley
Disaster Music

James T. Phillips
1968: Year of the Rat

Joe Allen
The Real Bobby Kennedy

P. Sainath
Making Life Brighter in Kondapur

David Macaray
Should Unions be More Democratic?

B.R. Gowani
Experience and the Two-for-One

Fred Gardner
What Happened (at the DA's Office)

Peter Harley
Technology to the Rescue? Kurzweil and the Human Machines

Michael Dickinson
Surrender the Bones of Geronimo!

Jen Roesch
Where are the Real Women in Sex and the City?

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Landau, and Buknatski

Website of the Day
Partying with the Waltons

June 6, 2008

Frank Barat
An Interview with Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky on the Future of Israel / Palestine

Patrick Cockburn
U.S. Extorts Iraq to Approve Military Deal

Gary Leupp
Cheney Enrages Iraqis Over Security Deal

James Abourezk
Name That Terrorist

Peter Morici
Recession Grips the Jobs Market

Faheem Hussain
What is NATO Doing in Afghanistan?

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo's Britons Go on Hunger Strike

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
How Will Musharraf Go? Impeachment or Safe Exit?

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs to Defend Itself

Website of the Day
Backstage with Bo Diddley

June 5, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Bush's Secret Deal Would Ensure Permanent U.S. Occupation of Iraq

Sharon Smith
Hillary's Wreckage

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Electoral Dilemma: Latinos or Reagan Democrats?

Linn Washington, Jr.
Police Brutality and Cover-Up in Philly

Omar Barghouti
60 Years of Nakba, 41 Years of Occupation ...

Scott Pellegrino
Jim Crow Radio: Bob Grant's Lifetime Achievement Award

John Walsh
Obama Woos AIPAC

Dan Bacher
The Parching of California

DC Larson
Nazi Rockers ... F-Off

Robert Jensen
Masculine, Feminine or Human?

Website of the Day
Ohio Cops Attack Long Walkers

June 4, 2008

Eric Walberg
Princess Patricia and the Taliban

Gary Leupp
Iran and EFPs: Chronology of a Lie

Ralph Nader
Disenfranchised Youth

Dave Lindorff
Of Whiners and Poor Losers

George Wuerthner
Farm Economics

Victor M. Rodriguez
The Puzzle of Race and Politics

Remi Kanazi
Why a Cultural Boycott of Israel is Needed

Stephane Luçon
Renault's Romanian Fairyland Suspended

Farzana Versey
The Tablighi Jamaat Movement

Laray Polk
The Militarization of Space

Website of the Day
Red State Rebels

June 3, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts /
Lawrence M. Stratton
Legislating Tyranny

Mike Whitney
The Withering Economy

Steve Early
San Juan Showdown

Manuel Otero
Why Hillary Won Puerto Rico: the View from the Colony

George Bisharat
The Hope of a Victimized People

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's VP Quandry

Dan Bacher
Death on the Salmon Highway

Website of the Day
Censoring Bill Knott?

June 2, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Olmert Scandal

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Latino Problem Getting Worse

Allan J. Lichtman
Revisionist History: Bush, Borah and Hitler

Malini Johar Schueller
The Color of Randomness: Returning to the US From Beirut Via Syria

Robert Weissman
What's Driving Skyrocketing Oil Prices?

Peter Morici
Bailing Out Wall Street

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Don't Get Burned: How to Protect Yourself From Raytheon's Pain Gun

John Ross
Celebrating Catholic Fanaticism in Mexico

Ahmad Al-Akhras
Encounters with the Watch List

Website of the Day
Man on Earth

May 31 / June 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Worst is Yet to Come

Jeffrey St. Clair
Arkansas Bloodsuckers

Gary Leupp
How McClellan Prettifies Bush

Stan Cox
Broken Agriculture

Rannie Amiri
Lebanon: the Domino That Wouldn't Fall

P. Sainath
A Guaranteed Day's Work--in the Fields, at 110 Degrees, for $2 a Day

Binoy Kampmark
Going Bankrupt in Vallejo

Robert Fantina
Bush, Rice and McClellan

Seth Sandronsky
Will There be Water Riots, as Sacramento Goes Dry?

Corporate Crime Reporter
Death Penalty for Bush?

Anthony DiMaggio
Gaming the Ghetto: Grand Theft Auto IV, Racist Media and the Concrete Jungle

Karl Grossman
A Half-Trillion for Nukes

Matt Reichel
From Vegas to the Heartland and Back Again

Paul Myron Hillier
Of Gas and God

Andy Worthington
Suicide at Guantánamo

David Yearsley
And the Winner is ... Wayne Shorter

Daniel Cassidy
Free Lunch

Charles Thomson
If Hitler Had Been a Hippy ...

Gary Corseri
A Dream Deferred: Activism and the Arts

Wajahat Ali
Sex and the City Through a Man's Eyes

Ron Jacobs
Robins Weep

Poets' Basement
McNeill and Davies

Website of the Day
Last Charge of the Light Horse

May 30, 2008

Bassam Aramin
Here's the Truth You've Been Running From

Andrew Cockburn
Petraeus' Iran Obsession

Saul Landau
How We Got Into This Mess

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet South America's New Secessionists

Robert Sandels
Turning Back the Clock on Cuba

Dave Lindorff
Talk is Cheap

Martha Rosenberg
Raiding Big Meat; Arresting the Wrong People

Harvey Wasserman
Lieberman & McCain: Linking Internet Censorship and Atomic Reactor Terror

Doug Giebel
A Plague on Both Your Houses (of Congress)

Shaun Harkin
The Trial of the Raytheon 9

Website of the Day
The Once and Future Environmental Movement

May 29, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bill Clinton and the Rich Women

Nikolas Kozloff
Puerto Rico, Obama and the Politics of Race

Col. Dan Smith
Deceiving the Dead

Karl Grossman
The Most Lucrative Incentive for Nuclear Power in the History of the United States

William S. Lind
Inside the Washington Game

Robert Weissman
What to do About the Price of Oil

Dave Lindorff
Why Puerto Rico Won't Matter

David Macaray
A Union Fable

Chris Genovali
Fear and Loathing in the Northern Rockies

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Battle Over Oil

Website of the Day
Support Antiwar.com

May 28, 2008

Wajahat Ali
The Libertarian Dark Horse: An Exclusive Interview with Ron Paul

Ralph Nader
What's Really Driving the High Price of Oil?

Brian McKenna
Why I Want to Teach Anthropology at the Army War College

Corporate Crime Reporter
Why Vincent Bugliosi Wants to Prosecute George W. Bush for Murder

Brian Cloughley
The Attack on Damadola

Eric Walberg
Opium for the Masses from Afghanistan

Michael Dickinson
Raytheon's Pain Ray: Coming to a Protest Near You

Ijaz Khan
Opening Windows in Pakistan

Website of the Day
Older Than America

May 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Her Mind She's Killed Before: the Plot to Assassinate Ralph Nader

Greg Kafoury
Is Obama Turning (Further) Right?

Jean Bricmont
Western Delusions

Tim Wise
Farrakhan is not the Problem

Ricardo Alarcón
Puerto Rico's Turn

Stephen Soldz
APA Supports Psychologist Engagement in Bush Regime Interrogations

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo 16

Alan Singer
Vapid, Stupid and Insulting: Chuck Schumer Speaks to the Graduates

Richard Neville
Storm in an A-Cup

Susie Day
Gone with the W

May 26, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Syrian Option

Bill Quigley
War Immemorial Day

Col. Dan Smith
Retreating from Hell: a Different Memorial Day

Cindy Sheehan
Why Memorial Day is a Double-Whammy for Me

Marjorie Cohn
Hillary's Assassination Politics: Her Last Shot?

Fred Gardner
Does the VA Care?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Pain Pays: Getting Rich at NY Presbyterian Hospital

Harvey Wasserman
Mugging the Election System

Moncia Benderman
Truth Matters

David Rovics
In Praise of Utah Phillips

Website of the Day
Fox News Jokes About "Knocking Off" Osama and Obama

May 24 / 25, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

Jeffrey St. Clair
Yellowstone: How Sununu Shrank the Ecosystem

Barbara Rose Johnston
Dam Legacies, Damned Futures

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Fourth Fleet in Venezuelan Waters

Adriana Kojeve
The Environment and the 2008 Elections

Robert Fantina
Justice Department's Revelations on Torture

Dave Lindorff
Bush's War on Children in Iraq

David Yearsley
The War on Kitsch

Nelson P. Valdés
The Buying of "Democracy" Agents in Cuba

Kathleen M. Barry
Celebrating Ethnic Cleansing

John Ross
Mexico's Narco Opera Reaches for High Point

Allison Kilkenny
Apathy Doesn't Live in Bronx

Fred Gardner
Orangeburg, 1968

Elizabeth Schulte
Can the Whole World be Fed?

Daniel Gross
Remembering the Wendy's Massacre: the Dangerous Side of Retail Work

Christopher Brauchli
The Search for a Token Right-winger

Richard Rhames
A Nation of Sheep

Daniel Cassidy
My Mother

Poets' Basement
Davies, Klipschutz and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Happy Birthday, Bob

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

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Another Scheme from the Greed Machine

The Off-Shore Drilling Scam

By ALAN FARAGO

No Americans aren’t going to trust Republicans on the expansion of offshore oil drilling to lower the price of gasoline. Just add this to the long list of errors, missteps and miscalculations reflected in the recent AP-Ipsos poll: “When other surveys are taken into account, the general level of pessimism is the worst in almost 30 years.”

In Rassmussen Reports, Dick Morris writes the McCain has outflanked Obama “big time”. “His call yesterday for offshore oil drilling—and Bush’s decision to press the issue in Congress—puts the Democrats in the position of advocating the wear-your-sweater policies that made Jimmy Carter unpopular.”

Morris is dead wrong.

The complacency of the American voter has been shaken and jarred by the thievery and lying of the party of presumptive fiscal conservatism, and there is going to be hell to pay in November.

It doesn’t matter what Republicans say, at this point. After the worst presidency in modern US history, there is no where for Republicans to hide and certainly not in the premise that American oil companies can rescue consumers either from the cost of gasoline or climate change.

It is not just wars waged on false pretenses and the squandering of American treasure, or jobs floating away to low-cost labor nations. It is not just that corporate America derives ever greater percentages of profits from overseas operations, or, the cratering dollar and collapsing home values, or, declining standards for worker safety, inspections for food safety and public health, or, the terrible costs of extreme weather.

The right-wing spin machine is busted.

AP reports, “Those who said the country was on the wrong track totaled 76 percent of the people contacted in the survey, which was taken from June 12-16. That’s up from 71 percent in April and 66 percent near the end of 2007.” You can roll up Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and the rest: the American people aren’t buying what they are selling. Period.

The problem is captured in the slow motion train wreck of the nation’s credit markets. People are putting two and two together, finally: the ruined landscape of suburban America and the “ownership society” (remember, that promise?) is based on Wall Street greed and manipulation whose dimensions are more staggeringly clear, with each passing week.

The Wall Street Journal reports Former Goldman Sachs chairman and current US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson is going to call for “quick regulatory changes to the oversight of financial markets, including expanding the role of the Federal Reserve." (June 19, 2008, “Paulson to call for new Fed role”)

“We must dramatically expand our attention to the fundamental needs of our system, and move much more quickly to update our regulatory structure always keeping in mind that there must be a balance between market discipline and market oversight,” Paulson is expected to say, today.

And that is the issue with the Republicans, across a wide spectrum of policy issues including energy and the environment: they talk “balance” and they practice extremism.

They talk “market discipline” as they loot our treasure. How else to interpret the bailout of Bear Stearns or the Federal Reserve allowing banks to pledge toxic debt as collateral for their further borrowing to shore up fictitious capital ratios and solvency? The people who created this mess were not “tax and spend liberals”: they were dark suited, patent-leathered Republicans preaching “compassionate conservatism” and delivering neither.

In a New York Times news analysis (“$4 gasoline and the $64 dollar question”, July 19th, 2008), Robin West, an energy consultant and former Reagan energy department appointee, “argues that additional supply could make a difference in price, especially if domestic drilling were coupled with aggressive conservation efforts. He said it would take time, though—a minimum of five or six years, even if drilling were to begin today.”

There’s that “balance”, again. What are the chances that the John McCain will deliver “aggressive conservation”?

In South Florida, we have our own model for the failed Republican “balance”: it is etched all over the landscape with low density, sprawl housing far from places of work—imposing costs on transportation, infrastructure, and the environment that conservationists bitterly protested for decades.

The way that was supposed to “solve” the balance between development and wetlands, between inner city residents and wealthier constituents was to be called “Eastward Ho!”. It was a bipartisan concept devised more than a decade ago, in furtherance of development closer to the urban core, to provide for growth without putting unsustainable costs on taxpayers.

As a Republican-dominated executive and legislative branch prevailed in the intervening years, what emerged in Florida from “Eastward Ho!” was nothing like the bipartisan consenus: it was a mad rush, lead by the likes of top Bush and McCain campaign fundraiser, Al Hoffman, to build condos and suburbs like there was no tomorrow.

It was all and everything, and it was based on the massive and unsupervised leverage of toxic debt that made insiders rich and most people plain poorer.

As a result, the US economy is running on fumes. And John McCain—in his gambit to support offshore oil drilling—is breathing the same air as the Bush White House.

People don’t want the spin, and don’t believe it any more. “For the average American, everything’s going wrong. I think there’s a lot of reasons for households to be pessimistic. I think things have gotten tougher for most,” Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com told the Associated Press.

Expansion of offshore oil drilling would be the fulfillment of Big Oil’s mission, expressed in secret meetings with Vice President Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force in early 2001. No doubt, in the insulated corridors of power and influence, there is nothing wrong with this latest electoral ploy: one more turn at the roulette wheel.

The bottom line is that Americans are simply fed up with the risks and the gamblers in Republican ranks who always seem to get free passes to play with house money. It is not the way Americans do their home accounting.

There are undercurrents of revulsion and anger against the right-wing spin machine and the Republican candidates it represents. The premise that offshore drilling for oil will lower prices at the pump is no more credible than using weapons of mass destruction as a rationale for war in Iraq.

The window is shut to Republicans in this presidential election cycle, through no one’s fault but their own.

Alan Farago lives in south Florida. He can be reached at: afarago@bellsouth.net

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