Dave Lindorff's blog

The Democratic Presidential Nomination Fight: A View from Pennsylvania

Dave Lindorff — Fri, 09 May 2008 09:02:00 -0400

The results in Tuesday's twin primaries--Barack Obama by 14 percent in North Carolina and Hillary Clinton by 2 percent in Indiana--confirmed that Clinton is finished as a contender. Barack Obama will be the Democratic candidate for president this fall.

Clinton, the private-schooled, Wellesley and Yale-educated millionaire lawyer from Chicago, first tried to present herself as a White House veteran, and then, in recent weeks, as a NASCAR mom on Food Stamps, and in Pennsylvania resorted to cheap race-baiting and red-baiting in an effort to derail her opponent, has failed. Barack Obama, another private-schooled Harvard and Yale-educated lawyer, but one who actually did have to work his way up the economic ladder, won decisively in North Carolina, even drawing a significant number of working-class white voters in a state where white voters have not traditionally voted for candidates with dark skin.

The Bush Family’s Bad Latin Real Estate Investment

Dave Lindorff — Sat, 03 May 2008 13:22:35 -0400

Back in late 2006, it was widely reported in the Latin American media that President Bush, or perhaps his old man, had bought a 100,000-acre farm in a remote area of Paraguay.

What struck people at the time was the choice of country. Paraguay, of course, has gained a certain Club Med status among the world's villains and criminal elements as the place to go when the law's on your tail. The country, ruled for six decades by the dictatorial and fascist Colorado Party of Gen. Alfredo Stroesser, an almost cartoon charicature of a Latin American dictator, has no extradition treaty with any nation.

That's why it has long harbored aging Nazis, bank robbers, and a string of ousted or retired Latin American dictators and their assistants over the years.

American and Israeli War Crimes: Same Atrocities, Different Responses

Dave Lindorff — Fri, 02 May 2008 09:07:27 -0400

In the last few days, both the Israeli military and the US military have fired missiles into homes, in an effort to target what they said were terrorists, in the process killing many innocent civilians.

But what a contrast we see in both the reporting on these events, and in the response within the two countries!

In the Israeli case, the IDF fired a missile into a family home in Gaza, killing a mother and her four young children, who were eating breakfast at the time. The children were aged 6 through 15 months. While the IDF and the Israeli government blamed the tragedy on Hamas, saying it operates in proximity of civilians and is thus responsible for their deaths, an Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, has caqlled for a criminal investigation into the killings, saying that Israel and the IDF have violated internation law by firing the missile in a densely populated area where civilian casualties would be likely. A spokesman for the group, Sarit Michaeli, says that Israeli claims that it is not responsible for such deaths are incorrect, and adds that under international law, “Even if you attack a legitimate military target, the anticipated damage has to be in proportion to the anticipated gain.”

Invasion of the Pumpheads!

Dave Lindorff — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 08:31:25 -0400

Is America at the mercy of an invasion of the pumpheads?

The bizarre behavior of Bill Clinton during this campaign season, which has seen this once smooth-talking and politically uber-sophisticated campaigner repeatedly stick a foot in his mouth and undermine his wife's struggling campaign, raises the issue of whether he is suffering from postperfusion syndrome-a now recognized cognitive impairment common in patients who have undergone heart bypass surgery.

Referred to in hospital jargon as "pumphead syndrome," the condition, thought to be caused by debris and bubbles that are created and released into the bloodstream by artificial pumps used to circulate blood while hearts are being operated on-material that can block blood flow in smaller vessels in the brain, causing neurological damage--this recognized condition has been demonstrated in some studies to lead to significant cognitive impairment that can show up in as many as 42 percent of heart surgery patients even as long as five years after surgery.

The Clock is Ticking for an Attack on Iran

Dave Lindorff — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 10:18:16 -0400

I admit to feeling a little like the weatherman who keeps saying it's going to rain, and who eventually is proven correct. I feel certain that the Bush/Cheney regime is going to launch a disastrous attack on Iran, but have made several calls, which have been proved wrong, beginning back in October 2006, when I wrote that it looked like several aircraft carrier battle groups were being put in position for the assault, but then it was called off.

Now it looks like the attack is coming soon.

The Washington Post's Ann Scott Tyson is today reporting in an article headlined, Joint Chiefs Chairman Says US Preparing Military Options Against Iran, that Admiral Michael Mullen, the nation's top military officer, thinks the US military is not stretched too thin to take on Iran, and that Iran is becoming an "increasingly lethal and malign influence" in Iraq.

Spoiling the Party: Clinton and the Michigan and Florida Votes

Dave Lindorff — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 11:05:28 -0400

Let's at least make one thing clear: Hillary Clinton's claim that she is ahead in the popular vote for the Democratic nomination, based upon her having "won" the renegade "primaries" in Michigan and Florida, is both nonsense and potentially fatally destructive of the Democratic campaign.

First the nonsense. In both states, because the local parties decided to hold primaries out of order and much earlier than scheduled by the Democratic National Committee, those votes did not count, and the delegates chosen will not be counted at the August convention.

In Michigan, Obama honored the rules of the game and asked that his name be removed from the ballot. Clinton, already plotting for a fall-back scheme, left her name on the ballot (her campaign disingenuously claimed they "forgot" to remove it). So it was Hillary against Nobody. Even so, Nobody did pretty well back on Jan. 15, grabbing 40 percent of the vote to Clinton's 55 percent. Moreover, turnout was an abysmal 20 percent. Clearly most Democrats and independents (who in Michigan, unlike in Pennsylvania, were allowed to vote in either party's primary) didn't bother to even go to the polls. It's safe to assume that the Clinton machine in Michigan was quietly encouraging its backers to go cast ballots, too, while Nobody didn't have any campaign staff, and so could not do that, so even Clinton's numbers, such as they are, are questionable. The idea that the results of that joke of a primary could be counted, and that the delegates and vote totals could be assigned to the Clinton column is beyond preposterous.

Clinton Courted Racists in the Pennsylvania Primary

Dave Lindorff — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:02:11 -0400

Time for a discussion on...not race, but racism.

One of the clear observations that can be made about the ugly Democratic presidential primary just held in Pennsylvania is that it was marred by racism.

The winning candidate, Hillary Clinton, who bested Barack Obama by just over 9 percent of the vote after a six-week campaign, made a determined effort to court the white, working class voters in Pennsylvania's midsection and in the heavily ethnic northeastern part of the state, and she succeeded. According to exit polls, for example, white men voted 57 percent for Clinton and 43 percent for Obama. White women went 68 percent for Clinton and 32 percent for Obama. White Catholics, a particular target of the Clinton campaign, went 70 percent for Clinton and 30 percent for Obama--her biggest margin of any grouping.

What Double-Digit Win!: Rounding Out the Pennsylvania Primary Story

Dave Lindorff — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:13:09 -0400

The corporate media have been quick to buy into and promote the Hillary Clinton campaign claim that she won the Pennsylvania primary by "double digits," but the truth is, that involves a bit of creative rounding.

The final figures for the vote are that Clinton won 1,258,245 votes out of 2,300,542 cast, compared to 1,042,297 for Barack Obama.

If you do the math, that works out to 54.71 percent for Clinton, and 45.31 percent for Obama.

Now granted, if you use the convention of rounding up numbers 5 or above and rounding down numbers below 4 and below, you get 55 percent for Clinton and 45 percent for Obama. But if you take the actual numbers, 54.71 and 45.31, and calculate the difference, it works out to 9.40 percent. And that is a number closer to 9 than to 10.

Hillary Clinton's Monstrous Threat

Dave Lindorff — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 08:08:24 -0400

Tough guy Hillary Clinton, on the morning of a critical primary vote in Pennsylvania, uttered a monstrous threat, saying on ABC's "Good Morning America program today that if Iran were to launch a nuclear attack on Israel while she was president, "we would be able to totally obliterate them."

Think about that a moment! A country that we view as a theocracy, run dictatorially by a bunch of self-appointed religious fanatics, whose rule is enforced by an army of equally fanatic quasi-military thugs and enforcers, launches an attack on America's ally Israel, and Clinton says her response would be to incinerate the people of that country--people who are as powerless to stop such an attack as would be the people of Israel or the United States.

The US Economy and the Costs of War

Dave Lindorff — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 07:36:41 -0400

Is the Iraq War to blame for America's long-term economic decline and for the current economic crisis?

Martin Neil Baily, a chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton, and now director of the business initiative at the Brookings Institution, in an opinion piece that ran Sunday in the New York Times, says no. Claiming to be opposed to the Iraq War, he nonetheless suggests that the nearly $500 billion spent on Iraq to date--all of it borrowed money--cannot be blamed for the credit crisis, or for high oil prices.

But Baily is looking at things way too narrowly. First of all, As Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel economist and chief economist at the World Bank, has noted, the real cost of the Iraq War is probably now closer to $3 trillion, in terms of future costs of veterans benefits, replacement of equipment, and payment on the debt that has been piling up because of the government's unwillingness to make the public pay for the war in real time. That whopping bill is in the minds of the international investors who have been deserting the dollar in droves, causing it to approach Third World status as a currency.

In Praise of Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground

Dave Lindorff — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:46:13 -0400

The pundits are having a heyday with Hillary Clinton's sleazy McCarthyite attack on Barack Obama during the April 16 debate, trying to link him to the Weather Underground because of his having served on a charity organization board with one of the Weathermen, Bill Ayers, who is currently a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois, and who is married to Bernadine Dohrn, another Weather Underground veteran.

What has them in a lather is Ayer's comment, made a few years ago, that he has no regrets for the organization's having set off several bombs back in the early 1970s, and that in fact they "should have set of more." (Incidentally, as Robert Parry notes, those comments were made before 9-11, not, as Hillary Clinton charged duplicitously in the April 16 Philadelphia debate, right after 9-11.)

Smears, Jeers and the Debate That Wasn't in Pennsylvania

Dave Lindorff — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 07:17:20 -0400

Clinton and the Disney Channel (ABC is 100% owned by the Disney Corp.) attacked candidate Barack Obama with a vengeance in Wednesday evening's "debate" in Philadelphia.

It's not clear whether the attack will have any impact on the crucial primary here next Tuesday, but it was clear that the Clintons, now desperate to win big and keep Hillary's foundering campaign afloat, are ready to resort to McCarthyism, lies and cheap shots and whatever else they can come up with in an effort to crush Obama in Pennsylvania. It's also clear that the corporate media, as exemplified by ABC's hatchet men George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson, are going to go after Obama on the lamest of issues from now through November's election if (as is looking increasingly likely) he wins the nomination.

Notes from the "Bitter and Frustrated" Heartland

Dave Lindorff — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:46:05 -0400

I find it interesting that among the responses to my recent column about Obama's "bitterness and frustration" comments regarding rural Americans, those that came from rural folks--including from the two towns I mentioned in Upstate New York--backed him up.

I don't know how this will all play out in Pennsylvania's primary next Tuesday. I'm terrible at predicting these things. But I have a suspicion that the people who are in a snit over Obama's comments are either rabid Republicans or are already firmly committed Hillary Clinton fans. Those who support Obama are unlikely to change their views, and may even become more committed to making it to the polls. In the end, it all could be a ratings-driven media dust-up. But meanwhile. It's worth reading what some country folk have to say about it all.

Finding Voters `Bitter and Frustrated,' Obama is Sounding Like Nader

Dave Lindorff — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 11:31:45 -0400

I haven't lived in rural Pennsylvania or in rural Indiana, but I have lived in rural upstate New York, in towns where there are so few Democrats that on some local election ballots, not a single position, from town council to justice of the peace, has a contest. As in China, your option is to vote for the Republican candidate, or to leave that line blank.

And many of the people in these towns, uniformly white, when they talk politics, spend a lot of their time complaining about black people, immigrants (neither of whom can even be found in the vicinity) and the threat to their guns.

Barack Obama is exactly right.

On Waking Sleeping Giants

Dave Lindorff — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 09:07:40 -0400

During my six-year sojourn in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, one of the things I came away with was a sense of how generally un-nationalistic and non-patriotic the Chinese people were.

Caught up in the struggle first to simply survive and then, in the mid-90s, to try and grab onto the moving train that was China's new Great Leap into Capitalism, average mainland Chinese, whether out in the remote farmlands of western Anhui Province or in the rundown house lining the hutongs of Shanghai or Beijing, had no time for patriotic displays or nationalistic concerns.

When Chinese Communist Party leaders in Beijing would beat the drum of nationalism over Taiwanese independence efforts in the 1990s, it evoked mostly yawns among average Chinese people, and in fact, to Beijing's embarrassment, a popular computer game featured a war-game in which Taiwan defeated the People's Liberation Army.

Listen to the General (No, Not Petraeus!)

Dave Lindorff — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 10:47:47 -0400

In a couple days, Americans will be deluged with effusive, praise-filled stories in what passes for news organizations, print and electronic, in the US, quoting Gen. David Petraeus on the glories of his and President Bush's brilliant so-called "surge" strategy in Iraq.

There will be little critical comment on his report, which will claim that the surge is working but that Iraqi's "need to do more" to take advantage of the surge in stability to create a stable government in Baghdad.

He will claim, and the media will help him here, that the collapse of President Nouri al-Maliki's "defining moment" attack on the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr in Basra, with 1000 of his crack troops and two leading officers defecting to the other side, and Maliki himself having to be rescued by American troops, was a minor event. He will claim that the rise in violence in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq back to pre-surge levels is of no significance--a statistical aberration.

Thoughts on April 4

Dave Lindorff — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 22:32:07 -0400

For the first 18 years of my life, my birthdays were purely celebratory occasions, but since 1968, the day has always come tinged with a shadow. April 4 is the day Martin Luther King was shot.

I actually learned about King’s death sitting, appropriately, in a jail cell.

I was a freshman at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and had been given an assignment in my philosophy class to write a paper on Henry Thoreau’s influence on Mahatma Gandhi, and of course through him on Martin Luther King. Being 18 at the time, and it being spring, I decided I should write the paper not at school, but at Walden Pond in Massachusetts.

Bush's "Decisive Moments" - Both in Iraq and Back Home in D.C.

Dave Lindorff — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:49:25 -0400

Bush may not be the greatest of wordsmiths, but he certainly nailed it when he said that the battle in Basra, in which the puppet governent of Nuri al-Maliki and the Iraqi military were attacking the entrenched Mahdi Brigades of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr for control of Iraq's crucial port city, was a "defining moment" in the five-years-and-running Iraq conflict.

That battle, which saw al-Maliki fly down to the presidential palace in the country's second largest city to direct the army's fight, only to be spirited away by an American air rescue team when he was in danger of being captured or killed, is indeed a defining moment.

The "Mumia Exception": Third Circuit Court Rejects Abu-Jamal Appeal

Dave Lindorff — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:41:43 -0400

After spending almost a year's time deliberating following a hearing last May 17, a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia has shot down all three claims by death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal challenging his conviction for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner.

At the same time, the appeals court upheld a 2001 decision by Federal District Judge William Yohn that had overturned former Black Panther and Philadelphia journalist Abu-Jamal's death sentence, agreeing with the lower court judge that the form used by the trial jury in 1982 to establish whether jurors felt there were any mitigating circumstances was flawed, and could have left panelists mistakenly believing that before they could consider any such mitigating factors in their deliberations, they would all have to agree such a factor existed. In fact, by law if even one juror believes that there is a mitigating factor, that factor can be considered by jurors in deciding on death or life in prison.

Duck and Cover(Up): Hillary Under Fire

Dave Lindorff — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 18:59:50 -0400

So Hillary Clinton, her campaign sagging as it becomes clearer and clearer that she's not going to get the Democratic nomination unless she can destroy her opponent, insists she would have quit Barack Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago after hearing the allegedly "hateful" words of its pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

But wait a sec. Putting aside the matter of whether what Wright said was even "hateful," this same Hillary Clinton chose the rabidly anti-semitic Rev. Billy Graham for spiritual mentor in her time of troubles during wayward hubby Bill's impeachment scandal, and welcomed his offer of support for her senate and presidential bids. This, of course, is the same Billy Graham who was caught on tape telling President Nixon that he thought Jews had a "stranglehold" on the American media, and that if something weren't "done about it," the "country's going down the drain."

News of Rapid Glacial Melting Raises a Big Question for Presidential Candidates

Dave Lindorff — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 20:35:43 -0400

Okay. Enough about race.

We've got a bigger problem here than how to get along with each other, as important as that may be, and that's how to make sure that any of us--or our children and grandchildren--are around in another hundred years.

Fast on the heels of reports about the increasingly, and unexpectedly rapid melting of Greenland's giant ice sheet, come even more scary reports about accelerated glacial melting in Antarctica, where there is a whole lot more ice.

Taken together, if these trends, which are based upon extensive photographic and on-the-ice observations, continue, not only could we see the oceans rise not just a few feet, but perhaps 15 feet within most of our lifetimes, with devastating results for coastal cities and regions around the world, but we could see runaway global warming ignited that could put the earth on a one-way trip to a mass extinction event worse, perhaps, than what hit the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

4000 US Dead: Maybe We Need is a National Spittoon in D.C.

Dave Lindorff — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:13:31 -0400

Well, the toll of wasted American lives in Iraq has hit 4000. But hey, who's counting?

Certainly not the folks in the White House and the Pentagon, and certainly not John McCain, the prospective Republican nominee for president, who thinks the war is going just dandy.

But it's worth noting that about a year ago, around the time that Bush's "surge" plan got implemented with the addition of some 30,000 additional troops to the Iraq theater, the number of dead was about 3000. So it's fair to say that Bush's "surge" policy--his "escalation of the war in order to end it" plan--has directly led to the deaths of 1000 more young American men and women.

Five Years of a Disastrous War and the Bills are Coming Due

Dave Lindorff — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 21:10:27 -0400

It's appropriate that on this week of the fifth anniversary of the criminal US invasion of Iraq, we are also seeing several other things: the death toll of American troops in that doomed adventure is rising past 4000, the economy is sliding into a recession which could be deep and long, and the financial markets are teetering on the edge of a possibly historic collapse.

The conjunction of all of these dire things is no coincidence.

The war on Iraq was a predictable disaster from day one, when the administration tried to do it on the cheap, using less than half the manpower that Bush's own generals said would be needed to control the country after the inevitable collapse of its government and military. But of course the US had to conduct this war on the cheap because the country was never really behind the war in the first place. It was a war that was "marketed" to us like a risky financial investment or a badly designed new car. The idea was to close the sale and get away from the deal as quickly as possible, leaving no office forwarding address.

Censorship and the Anemic State of Political Discourse in America

Dave Lindorff — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:47:00 -0400

When I lived in China in the early 1990s, there were things that you could not discuss. One was Tibet. Another was Taiwan, "referred to in my daughter's public elementary school in Shanghai as "China's largest island." Another was the 1989 massacre of students and workers in Beijing. I used to be grateful at the time that I was an American and that back home, we could talk about anything.

Except that in a way we can't. Not in public discourse, anyhow.

Take the silly broughhaha on the Right, in the media, and in the Democratic primary campaign, over the statements of Obama's "spiritual mentor" the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

It's the "Oh Shit!" Moment on Iran

Dave Lindorff — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:48:48 -0400

Every horror movie has that "Oh Shit!" moment, when the hero or heroes are huddled in some creepy hideout, and suddenly something happens that tells you that the monster is just around the corner, or just about to attack. In "Jurassic Park" it was the pulsing ripples in a cup of water, heralding the arrival of a T-Rex. In "Jaws" it was the deep bass music, letting you know that a monstrous shark was about to attack.

Well, we just got our "Oh Shit!" moment with the just-announced resignation of Admiral William J. Fallon, the military commander of US Middle East operations.

Adm. Fallon, 63, famously said that an attack on Iran would not happen "on my watch," and is widely believed to have already threatened, along with a number of other top generals and admirals, to quit the service if the Bush administration were to launch an air attack on Iran.