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Today's Stories

May 13, 2005

Joshua Frank
The Politics of Tenure at Yale: an Interview with David Graeber

May 12, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
America is Losing: More Phony Jobs Hype

Uri Avnery
Death of a Myth

Greg Moses
Neo-Con Logic at the Border

Carolyn Baker
The Politics of Dominionism: the New Religious Right in America

Pat Williams
Amateurish High Jinks on Roadless Areas

William S. Lind
Reality Gap: the Myth of US Invincibilty

Jack Random
The Dubious Wisdom of George W. Bush

Gary Leupp
Douglas Feith Bares His Soul to Jeffrey Goldberg

 

May 11, 2005

Patrick Cockburn
The Rise, Fall and Rise of Ahmed Chalabi: King of Jordan to Pardon His $300 Million Bank Swindle

Kevin Zeese
The Occupation Gets More Saddam-like Every Day

Christopher Brauchli
Coffee, Tea or Torture?: A One Way Ticket to Uzbekistan

Zalman Amit
The Collapse of Academic Freedom in Israel: Tantura, Teddy Katz and Haifa University

Robert Shull
Carte Blanche for the Terror Cops: Senate Gives DHS Power to Waive All Laws

Mike Whitney
God, Gays, and George Bernard Shaw

Dr. Teresa Whitehurst
Anti-Arabic Week at a Southern High School

Norman Solomon
Political Bluster and the Filibuster

 

May 10, 2005

Richard Drayton
The Imperial Mythology of WW II: an Ethical Blank Check

Dave Zirin
Steve Nash's Brilliant Year: Anti-War Hoopster Wins NBA's MVP

Jackie Corr
The Medicare Catch: Mrs. O'Hara's Windfall

Dave Lindorff
Silence of the Scams: Economists on China

Michael Donnelly
From Roadless to Clueless: the Great Stillborn Eco Victory

Reza Fiyouzat
Nomadic Abstracts

Scott Parkin
Taking Direct Action Against Halliburton

Stephen Babcock
The Burden of Knowing Better

Alan Farago
Florida, Water and Lobbyists

Michael Neumann
Naomi's Courage

Website of the Day
One Nation Under Plagiarism

 

May 9, 2005

Louis Proyect
Shilling for Chevron: Jared Diamond, Greenwasher

Robert Fisk
"Mission Accomplished": the Occupation, Year Two

Kevin Zeese
Concientious Objection on Trial: the Court Martial of Keith Benderman

Joshua Frank
Kerry Bashes Gay Marriage

Sasha Kramer
A Mother's Day Call for Justice in Haiti's Prisons

Andrew Wimmer
Create and Resist

Jeffrey Webber
Back to the Streets in Bolivia?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Straight to Bechtel

May 7 / 8, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
Who Beat Hitler?

Gary Leupp
Biblical Prophecy and Christian Zionism

Saul Landau
Pope Torquemada: Purges, Pedophiles and Cover-Ups

Joe DeRaymond
Autumn of the Revolutionary: Another Look at Daniel Ortega

Daniela Ponce
Seeing Chile in Nepal

Heather Williams
Hollywood Does Enron

Gregory Elich
Zimbabwe's Fight for Justice

Anis Memon
To Cuba and Back

John Chuckman
The Peculiar State: "Criticism of Israel is a Form of Anti-Semitism"

Mike Whitney
Hard Right Rage Against the Truth

Ron Jacobs
Re-Reading "Born on the Fourth of July" as the Iraq War Grinds On

Colin Kalmbacher
Whither Disorder? Ann Coulter and the Texas Police State, Cont.

Lance Selfa
Uprising in Mexico City

Fred Gardner
"Getting High is a Little Like Cuba"

Ben Tripp
Letters on Wittgenstein

Mickey Z.
The Mother of All Days

Richard Joseph
Those Patriotic Magnets

Dr. Susan Block
Come As You Are: Masturbation 101

Poets' Basement
Smith-Ferri, Louise, Nettnin, Engel and Albert

 

May 6, 2005

Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad Diary: a Week of Bombs and Blood

Erin Yoshioka
Another "3 Strikes" Travesty: Why is Santo Reyes Facing Life in Prison?

Sam Husseini
Talking with Syrians

Dave Lindorff
Ernie Pyle Where Are You? When Reporters were Reporters

Kevin Zeese
Circus Trials of Abu Ghraib: When Even the Fall Girl Can't Plead Guilty

Joshua Frank
An Overextended US Military? It Won't Stop Another War

Dan Bacher
Tribes and Salmon Win One: Bush Backs Off Trinity River Water Raid

P. Sainath
India's Bloody Water Wars

 

May 5, 2005

Carles Mutaner
Is Chavez's Venezuela "Socialist" or "Populist?"

Carl G. Estabrook
Is There Any Hope for the Pope?

Farrah Hassen
The US's Syrian Obsession

Kevin Zeese
"Sent Into Combat Unequipped and Unprepared": an Interview with Patrick Resta

Michael Leonardi
May Day with an American Soldier in Rome

Bennett Ramberg
The Future of Nuclear Terror: Coming to a Reactor Near You

Ray McGovern
The Smoking Gun on White House Deceit

Norman Solomon
Nuclear Fundamentalism, the New York Times and Iran

Nicole Colson
The Back Alley Attack on Abortion Rights

Brian Concannon, Jr.
Clearing the Fences in Haiti

 

 

May 4, 2005

Colin Kalmbacher
Ann Coulter and the Police State: Heckle a Racist, Get Arrested

John Walsh
Al Franken is a Big Fat Phony: Lying on Air America to Support the War

Greg Moses
Vigilante Wedge: Schwarzenegger Reprises "Birth of a Nation"

Ali Khan
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Poised to Fall Apart

Chris Floyd
Ring Them Bells

Linda S. Heard
D-Day for Tony Blair: Bogeymen and Scare Tactics

Dave Zirin
The NFL, Congress and the Male Cheerleader Principle

William S. Lind
Fool's Paradise

Gary Leupp
Bolton's Proudest Moment: Breaking the UN's Anti-Zionist Resolution

Website of the Day
Kent State, May 4, 1970

 

May 3, 2005

Dave Lindorff
Bush has Grasped the Third Rail, Now Turn on the Juice

Brian Cloughley
Halliburton's War Loot

Ira Kurzban
Death Squad Diplomacy: How Bolton Armed Haiti's Thugs and Killers

Seth Sandronsky
Towards Debtors' Prisons?

Gilad Atzmon
The Labour Party Isn't an Option Any More

Michael Donnelly
Branding Eco Collapse

Alex Sanchez
Chile's Man at the OAS: a Blow to Bush?

Peter Linebaugh
Magna Carta and May Day

 

May 2, 2005

Ron Jacobs
Toward an Anti-Imperialist Movement

Stan Goff
The Case of Hasan Akbar

Karyn Strickler
Achieving Gender Balance in US Politics

Joshua Frank
Leaked UK Memo Indict's Blair's Iraq Folly

Kevin Zeese
Getting Out of Iraq will Prove Tougher Than Getting Out of Vietnam

Vicente Navarro
Pope Benedict: a Rightwing Politician

 

 

 

April 30 / May 1, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
Marla Ruzicka, Rachel Corrie and "Credibility"

Gabriel Kolko
Lessons from a Total Defeat: the End of the Vietnam War, 30 Years Later

Jennifer Loewenstein
The Disengaged: Gaza and the Fragmentation of Palestinian Nationhood

Lee Sustar
City for Sale: Richard Daley's Chicago

Saul Landau
The Bush-DeLay Axis of Naked Power

T.W. Croft
The Undiscovered Country: the High Tide of the Neo-Con Confederacy

Nikolas Kozloff
Fox News v. Hugo Chavez

William Blum
Never-Ending Double Standards

Dave Lindorff
Judicial Jury Tampering in Philly

Joshua Frank
The Bi-Partisan Assault on Teenage Girls

Doug Giebel
Saving Jane Fonda

Steven Erlanger
A Response to Kathy Christison, from the NYT Jerusalem Bureau Chief

Fred Gardner
Washington State Doctor Harassed

Mike Whitney
Another Mad Bush Press Conference

Kurt Nimmo
Putin Pussyfoots in Palestine

Joe DeRaymond
A Short History of the 15th Congressional District of Pennsylvania

Michael Dickinson
Flags

Mickey Z.
May Day at Yankee Stadium

Justin Taylor
The Crawling Chaos: HP Lovecraft's Polymorphous Legacy

Poets Basement
Krieger, Engel, Albert, St. Clair

Website of the Weekend
Save Barbados's Cowpastor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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May 13, 2005

The Sleazy World of Jeb Bush

Miami Vice

By CHRIS FLOYD

The next president of the United States was on the road last week, throwing red meat about "moral issues" to a baying crowd of Bushist Party faithful while simultaneously trying to cut off medical support for a six-year-old girl his agents had previously tried to kill.

Yes, it was Jeb Bush, governor of the ruling family's Florida dominions, pounding the pulpit, er, podium at a Republican conclave in Georgia. Jeb told the flock that the party must stand for "absolute truth" something previously associated with religious cults if they want to maintain their "ascendancy" over the nation, Associated Press reports. "There is such a thing as right and wrong," he declared. Whipped into a frenzy by this blazing revelation, the crowd responded with cries for Bush to ascend to his brother's throne in 2008.

But even as Jeb basked in the bootlicking adulation, his peculiar sense of "right and wrong" was on vivid display in a Florida courtroom. There, his minions are fighting to stop state aid for young Marissa Amora four years after they sought a court order to let her die following a savage beating, the Palm Beach Post reports. What's more, these same minions the Department of Children and Families could have prevented the beating, which left Marissa permanently disabled.

In late 2000, as Jeb was ensuring the "ascendancy" of his brother by among many other tricks deliberately slashing thousands of eligible African-American voters from the rolls, Marissa was hospitalized for a month. Doctors and nurses saw telltale signs of past beatings and witnessed her neglectful mother abusing her in the hospital. They pleaded for DCF to intervene. But the agency perhaps mindful of Jeb's fierce public championing of "family values" declined to step in.

Then came the inevitable: a few weeks later, Marissa was back in the hospital, beaten nearly to death, with severe injuries to her brain and liver and several broken bones. Now the DCF took an interest: they rushed to court to obtain a "Do Not Resuscitate" order for the mangled two-year-old. For God's sake, don't let her live, the DCF told Marisa's doctors, because she might "potentially" be left "in a vegetative state."

But the doctors disagreed with the Bushists' expert diagnosis. And so Marissa is still alive today brain-damaged, crippled, fed through a stomach tube, but alert, talkative, happy, with a new foster mother. Indeed, she would seem to be a shining example of the "culture of life" that we hear so much about these days from certain pulpit-pounding politicians. But to Jeb and the DCF, she's just a "useless eater," a budgetary burden, a mistake to be flushed away. Without state aid, her new family will sink beneath the staggering cost of Marissa's treatment and the decent life that she's clawed back from the hellhole Jeb left her in years ago will wither on the vine.

'Tis passing strange. After all, this is the same agency the same governor that just fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the long brain-dead Teri Schiavo existing in a very real "vegetative state." Jeb even found himself lauded on the front page of the New York Times for "cementing his political stature" in the case, with his maneuvers "rooted" in a "deeply-held" religious faith "rather than in political posturing." Yet he was perfectly willing even eager to pull the plug on Marissa Amora, and is still trying to destroy her life.

How can this be? For one who lives solely by the "absolute truth," what could possibly be the difference between a crippled, abused, neglected little black girl with no money or connections, and a nice white woman whose case was promoted world-wide by the maniacal, filthy-rich extremist factions that form the base of his brother's "ascendancy"? Since we know from the highest authority that Jeb would never stoop to mere "political posturing," the apparent hideous hypocrisy in his behavior must forever remain an ineffable mystery, like the Trinity, or the 2000 Florida election results.

But then, Jeb has always been the most mysterious of the Kennebunkport Klan. Like the two Georges, he trawled murky waters indeed to make his fortune. One of his business partners, Camilo Padrera, was indicted for drug-dealing, gun-running and embezzlement; but the charges were dropped when the Bush family firm the CIA told the FBI that Padrera was their man, fronting covert ops. Padrera then worked Jeb's Washington contacts to steal millions of federal dollars intended to provide housing for the poor. He was convicted of fraud in 1989.

Jeb then hooked up with Miguel Recarey, an associate of Miami mob boss Santo Trafficante Jr., Mother Jones reports. Federal investigators called Recarey's company, IMC, "a criminal enterprise interlaced with intelligence operations." It was in fact yet another front, this time for the Reagan-Bush gang's illegal terrorist war in Nicaragua. Recarey also milked Jeb's Washington connections, diverting millions of Medicare dollars intended for needy patients into the IMF-CIA slush fund. Recarey later fled the country to avoid fraud charges.

In yet another scam, Jeb and a partner used a frontman to wangle a $4.5 million federal loan to buy an office building. When their shill went belly-up, Daddy's federal government obligingly revalued the prime Miami real estate at $500,000. Jeb and pal coughed up that chump change --and kept the building for themselves: $4 million of pure gravy.

Now with just one more step, this mobbed-up, money-grubbing absolutist will have the whole world in his hands. "Right and wrong" mean nothing to such big-time operators; power is their only truth, their only god.

Chris Floyd is a columnist for The Moscow Times and a regular contributor to CounterPunch. His new blog of political news and commentary can be found at Empire Burlesque (www.empireburlesquenow.blogspot.com.)