From The NY Times
By Frank Rich

So much for a July Fourth week spent in idyllic celebration of our country’s birthday. This year’s festivities were marked instead by a debate — childish, not constitutional — over who is and isn’t patriotic. The fireworks were sparked by a verbally maladroit retired general, fueled by two increasingly fatuous presidential campaigns, and heated to a boil by a 24/7 news culture that inflates any passing tit for tat into a war of the worlds.

Let oil soar above $140 a barrel. Let layoffs and foreclosures proliferate like California’s fires. Let someone else worry about the stock market’s steepest June drop since the Great Depression. In our political culture, only one question mattered: What was Wesley Clark saying about John McCain and how loudly would every politician and bloviator in the land react?

Unable to take another minute of this din, I did what any sensible person might do and fled to the movies. More specifically, to an animated movie in the middle of a weekday afternoon. What escape could be more complete?

Among its other attributes, this particular G-rated film, “Wall-E,” is a rare economic bright spot. Its enormous box-office gross last weekend swelled a total Hollywood take that was up 20 percent from a year ago. (You know America’s economy is cooked when everyone flocks to the movies.) The “Wall-E” crowds were primed by the track record of its creator, Pixar Animation Studios, and the ecstatic reviews. But if anything, this movie may exceed its audience’s expectations. It did mine.

As it happened, “Wall-E” opened the same summer weekend as the hot-button movie of the 2004 campaign year, Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Ah, the good old days. Oil was $38 a barrel, our fatalities in Iraq had not hit 900, and only 57 percent of Americans thought their country was on the wrong track. (Now more than 80 percent do.) “Wall-E,” a fictional film playing to a far larger audience, may touch a more universal chord in this far gloomier time.

Read more Wall-E

From The Seattle PI
By Pauline Arrillaga

Even folks in the Optimist Club are having a tough time toeing an upbeat line these days. Eighteen members of the volunteer organization’s Gilbert, Ariz., chapter have gathered, a few days before this nation’s 232nd birthday, to focus on the positive: Their book drive for schoolchildren and an Independence Day project to place American flags along the streets of one neighborhood.

They beam through the Pledge of Allegiance, applaud each other’s good news - a house that recently sold despite Arizona’s down market, and one member’s valiant battle with cancer. “I didn’t die,” she says as the others cheer.

But then talk turns to the state of the Union, and the Optimists become decidedly bleak.

They use words such as “terrified,” “disgusted” and “scary” to describe what one calls “this mess” we Americans find ourselves in. Then comes the list of problems constituting the mess: a protracted war, $4-a-gallon gas, soaring food prices, uncertainty about jobs, an erratic stock market, a tougher housing market, and so on and so forth.

One member’s son is serving his second tour in Iraq. Another speaks of a daughter who’s lost her job in the mortgage industry and a son in construction whose salary was slashed. Still another mentions a friend who can barely afford gas.

Joanne Kontak, 60, an elementary school lunch aide inducted just this day as an Optimist, sums things up like this: “There’s just entirely too much wrong right now.”

Happy birthday, America? This year, we’re not so sure.

Read more Unhappy Birthday

From The LA Times
By Peter Gosselin

Economists — and what few friends the Bush administration still has — seem flabbergasted at how bleak Americans have grown about their economic prospects.

True, gasoline has shot past $4 a gallon. And house prices keep dropping. And unemployment is creeping higher and higher.

But is this really enough to send consumer confidence plunging to near-record lows? To convince more than 8 in 10 Americans that the country is headed in the wrong direction? Surely something else must be at work.

Republicans and some economic analysts think they know what that something is: Democratic doomsayers. Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina recently distilled this view with Nixonian flourish, declaring: “This is not a failed economy. We are not in recession. What a shame that Democrats want to talk down the economy.”

But I think there’s a better explanation for the public’s dark mood, one that’s closer at hand and deeper running than the talk-it-down theory.

Working Americans and their families arrived on the doorstep of the current economic crisis uniquely ill-equipped to cope with its consequences. Rather than having gained a financial protective coating during the period of growth that preceded it, working families up and down the income spectrum were actually nudged further out on an economic limb and therefore were primed for being picked off once problems emerged.

Read more Without a Net

From The Seattle Times
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

Success breeds separation.

That’s the thing no one tells you, the thing sometimes you don’t realize, the thing that might make a child turn from his own potential. Success is like a pyramid, broad at the bottom, but narrow at the summit; the higher you go, the fewer people go with you.

It’s a frightening thing for anyone, but especially frightening, perhaps, when you are young, gifted and black and coming of age in a culture where “everything” — from the shows on television to the friends at your side — says there is a certain way people like you are supposed to walk and talk and act and be.

The young men and women of Self Enhancement Inc. know all about it. Take Emanuel Ford. He is 18, a student at Grant High. Ford was born in Inglewood, Calif., in the territory of the Bloods street gang. His parents were both drug addicts.

Then his mother straightened herself up and moved him here, where he is flourishing. He looks back at the old places and, yes, he says, he feels that separation.

“My cousins and all my family members down there are still doing the same thing, still smokin’ weed, still bangin’. I feel like if I was still in that kind of position, I’d probably be shot, probably dead or in jail. By the grace of God I … changed my life, got on the right road and now I’m headed on the right path.”

For 11 years, Ford has been a client of SEI, a network of support programs — tutoring, college prep, sports and more — serving 2,300 students a year between second grade and age 25. It is featured in this installment of “What Works” — my series of columns on programs that are making a difference for black kids — because it, well, works. Two-thirds of its students improve their grades and behavior; 98 percent of its high-school freshmen graduate on time; 85 percent go to college.

Read more Growing Up

From True Blue Liberal
By Walter Brasch

Barack Obama spent the Fourth of July in Montana. A Red State. A state that few think he can win. A state that gave huge margins to George Bush the past two elections.

But here he was. On Independence Day. Marching in a parade. Hosting a picnic for hundreds. Trying to rally support for his Presidential run. Trying to show that he can appeal to voters of every political, social, and economic demographic. His web site tells us he “shook hands, kissed babies, signed autographs and posed for pictures.” Patriotism just oozed out of his every pore.

Barack Obama is now as patriotic as the electorate wants him to be. During most of the primaries, he didn’t wear a flag pin on his lapel. He didn’t think wearing pins makes one patriotic, or not wearing one makes someone unpatriotic. But, the right-wing lambasted him for that. Now he wears a flag pin.

And every speech he makes, he is now flanked by several American flags. Just in case anyone thinks he isn’t patriotic. Or is a foreigner. Or worse, a Muslim.

Barack Obama has changed in other ways. Once he said he would pull the U.S. out of Iraq. End that war. Now, he’s calling for a phased withdrawal. Read the rest of this entry »

From The Times UK
By Andrew Sullivan

It is a telling sign of where American politics is now headed that last week several leading conservative voices proclaimed Barack Obama had seen the conservative light and many leading liberal voices accused him of being a sellout.

At one extreme, The Wall Street Journal bizarrely claimed that Obama was now running for George W Bush’s third term. On the other, liberal blogger Arianna Huffington accused him of making a “very serious mistake” by agreeing to a new wire-tapping law. And leading left-wing blogger Markos Moulitsas accused Obama of “unnecessary stabbing” of political allies. Neither side, I’d say, is right – the truth is more muddy. However, if you want proof that Obama is one of the shrewdest – as well as one of the most inspiring – politicians in recent history, last week is hard to refute.

Obama began it with a full-throated defence of patriotism, in front of two large American flags, invoking his white family and its history of military service. He went out of his way to praise General David Petraeus and to condemn the attack by the antiwar group Moveon.org on him as “General Betray Us”.

Obama went on the next day to brazenly coopt one of Bush’s signature policy innovations, funnelling public money to the social services of religious organisations. He ended the week by dropping his previous long-held position on a fixed timetable for withdrawal from Iraq in favour of a “re-fined” strategy of withdrawal as soon as prudently possible after consultations with generals on the ground.

All of this caps a flurry of small adjustments in the postprimary phase. We now know that Obama can live with mass wire-tapping to gain antiterror intelligence, as long as it is placed under congressional law and oversight in ways Bush tried to avoid. He was fine about the Supreme Court’s defence of gun rights in the recently decided Dick Heller case (in which a Washington DC security guard argued for his right to carry a gun to protect himself); he supported the death penalty in some extreme cases such as child rape; he ran an ad touting his own role (much exaggerated) on welfare reform; and he also plans to avoid any tax hikes on the middle class while adding some strong fiscal medicine to the well-to-do.

Read more Center Ground

From CrossLeft
By Jim Ramelis

The blogs and main stream media are buzzing about Obama’s “move to the middle.” Is Obama moving to the middle? Is moving to the middle something new for Obama? I have been listening to Obama as he campaigned and have read about half of “The Audacity of Hope”. Compromise is a constant theme of Obama’s and a centrist populism is evident in his book, on the campaign trail, and on his official website that goes into his stand on issues. Let’s look at two recent issues, abortion and Iraqi will try and look at FISA and some others soon.

Arianna Huffington in a recent post on her site says:” The Obama campaign is making a very serious mistake. Tacking to the center is a losing strategy. And don’t let the latest head-to-head poll numbers lull you the way they lulled Hillary Clinton in December.” Arianna goes on to explain that it didn’t work for Gore and it didn’t work for Kerry and it won’t work for Obama either.

Obama recently said, in an interview with “Relevant”, a Christian magazine, that mental distress is not a valid reason for a late term abortion. Obama said “a strict, well defined exception for the health of the mother” is needed for late term abortion. Obama then stoked the controversy by saying “Now, I don’t think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term.”

Obama has consistently been pro-choice and given top ratings by NARAL. Is this a “flip-flop” or a move to the center? NARAL says the Obama position is consistent with Roe v Wade and they stand with their endorsement. Obama opposed Bush’s Federal Late Term Abortion Ban and says in “The Audacity of Hope”, “the willingness of even the most ardent prochoice advocates to accept some restrictions on late-term abortion marks recognition that a fetus is more than a body part and that society has some interest in its development”. Opinion: no big flip flop or change in position, just some nuance that does appear to move towards the center. I am with Obama on this one. Yes whenever the health of the mother is threatened at whatever stage of the pregnancy, abortion has to be an option that is legal. For late term pregnancies though, mental distress is not a compelling reason for abortion. Read the rest of this entry »

From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

Nancy Soderberg was deputy national security advisor and an ambassador to the United Nations in the Clinton administration. Today, she has an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times defending the FISA bill and telecom amnesty. The entire Op-Ed is just a regurgitation of the same trite, vague talking points which the political elite are using to justify this bill, accompanied by the standard invocations of “National Security” which our Foreign Policy elite condescendingly toss around to justify whatever policy they’re claiming is necessary to protect us. But it’s the language that she uses — and the brazenness of the lying (and that’s what it is) to justify this bill — that’s notable here.

It’s notable because the political establishment is not only about to pass a patently corrupt bill, but worse, are spouting — on a very bipartisan basis — completely deceitful claims to obscure what they’re really doing. This is what Soderberg says is what happened:

The Senate is dragging its feet because the compromise bill’s opponents — mostly Democrats — want also to punish the telecommunications companies that answered President Bush’s order for help with his illegal, warrantless wiretapping program. That is the wrong target.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the White House directed telecommunications carriers to cooperate with its efforts to bolster intelligence gathering and surveillance — the administration’s effort to do a better job of “connecting the dots” to prevent terrorist attacks. In its review of the effort, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that the administration’s written requests and directives indicated that such assistance “had been authorized by the president” and that the “activities had been determined to be lawful.”

We now know that they were not lawful. But the companies that followed those directives are not the ones to blame for that abuse of presidential power.

Read more Political Establishment

From The Boston Globe
Editorial

There are several obvious reasons, both ethical and practical, for the United States to reject the use of torture. But a sad new reason was added during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last month, when it was revealed that US military trainers instructed Army and CIA interrogators at Guantanamo in 2002 on “coercive management techniques” derived from Chinese communist practices.

Trainers and trainees alike were unaware that these techniques - keeping detainees awake, exposing them to extreme temperatures, or forcing them to stand in one position for an extended period - were drawn from a 1957 article on Chinese interrogation methods by a sociologist in the Air Force. The original study was titled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War.” Its chart of Chinese torture techniques had been used to teach Americans how to resist physical pressure of the kind that elicited flagrantly false confessions from American POWs during the Korean War.

The scandal in this disclosure - first reported in The New York Times Wednesday - is not that military authorities forgot where their torture techniques came from. The scandal is that Bush administration officials were so willfully blind to lessons learned about torture a half-century ago that they authorized interrogation methods that are not only barbaric, but that have been proven to produce unreliable confessions.

Vice President Dick Cheney and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld are old Cold War warriors. They belong to a generation of American officials who defined the struggle against communism not simply as a geopolitical clash between superpowers but as a contest between the rule of law and the law of the ruler, between civilized values and communist immorality. When they condoned torture, they made it seem that both sides came out of the Cold War as losers.

From Global Research
By Michel Chossudovsky

Is the war against Iran on hold?

Tehran is to allow foreign investors, in what might be interpreted as an overture to the West, to acquire full ownership of Iran’s State enterprises in the context of a far-reaching “free market” style privatization program.

With the price of crude oil at 140 dollars a barrel, the Iranian State is not in a financial straightjacket as in the case of most indebted developing countries, which are obliged by their creditors to sell their State assets to pay off a mounting external debt. What are the political motivations behind this measure? And why Now?

Several Western companies have already been approached. Tehran will allow foreign capital “to purchase unlimited shares of state-run enterprises which are in the process of being sold off”.

While Iran’s privatization program was launched during the government of Mohammed Khatami in the late 1990s, the recent sell-off of shares in key state enterprises points to a new economic design. The underlying measure is far-reaching. It goes beyond the prevailing privatization framework applied in several developing countries within America’s sphere of influence:

“The move is designed to attract greater foreign investment and is part of the country’s sweeping economic liberalization program.

Iran will no longer make a distinction between domestic and foreign firms that wish to purchase state-run companies as long as the combined foreign ownership in any particular industry does not exceed 35%. … As an example, a foreign firm may purchase an Iranian steel company but it would not be allowed to buy every business enterprise in Iran’s steel industry.

Read more War or Privatization