In April Thomas Sowell, a respected conservative scholar, wrote an insidious column undercutting Barack Obama and attacking preemptively the presumptive stupidity and gullibility of an American electorate that would elect him President simply to make a little history. (http://www.townhall.com/col umnists/ThomasSowell/2008/0 4/29/an_old_newness )  

This would not be particularly noteworthy were Sowell not an African American, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a "conservative think tank" located on the campus of Stanford University, one of the nation's leading research universities.  Over the years, Hoover salved the wounds and offered succor to some deeply troubled (and in trouble too) conservatives, among them former House Speaker Newt Gingrich,  and the architect of the U.S. disaster in Iraq, who Germany has indicted for war crimes, the former   Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Like them, Sowell seems to be exceedingly bright: Howard-to-Harvard, A.B.; MA from Columbia, Ph.D. from Chicago, a full three degrees above the G.E.D. he earned in the Marine Corps after quitting high school and fleeing North Carolina at age 17.  Although a self-described "libertarian," like the zealous conservatives who surround him Sowell unhesitatingly massages information to suit his purposes.  His transparently partisan "think pieces" are routinely fraught with half-truths and re-heated reporting. Critics might say that some essays cast him as a bit of an "Uncle Tom," never mind the term itself is often recklessly misapplied and as last week as, Sowell would say, "affirmative action" is.

What motivation do they have to change the system by which they've thrived? McCain, Clinton, and Obama must serve the interests of the corrupt corporate class -- or else they would be marginalized.

Here in this crumbling empire once known as the American Republic, here in a nation that, at present, for all practical purposes, only produces Cheetos and killer drones, whose architecture is being winnowed down to thriving rural meth houses and foreclosed upon suburban mchouses, whose corrupt corporate culture has bequeathed upon our suffering planet dying oceans and the hyper-caffeinated tsunami of Red Bull Capitalism -- the essential question confronts us -- how does one retain (not retail) one's humanity amid the catastrophic machinery and inane accoutrement of our age?

A respected national newspaper recently reported that Presidential candidate W. Mitt Romney's decision to suspend advertising in South Carolina and Florida "laid bare the dire condition of his run for the White House..."

Then Romney won going away in Michigan; a win that injected caffeine into his Postum and added more green to his already bulky bankroll.

The American people are very dissatisfied with the present state of affairs in their country. Polls taken in July revealed that less than 20 percent of Americans approve of the direction in which the United States is going. Furthermore, they are not naive as to the reason for this wrong direction: well over half the citizenry understands that a few billionaire tycoons have rigged our political system and media in order to advance their unfettered global business interests.

By Tyler LePard

Last Friday, reporters managed to stump 2008 presidential hopeful John McCain.  What tough topic caused the senator to pause awkwardly and stumble for an answer?  Iraq? No ... Poverty?  Try again ... Healthcare?  Getting closer ... Contraception?  Bingo!  Specifically, whether contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV and should they be publicly funded.

   

Now, this should be a no-brainer.  Honestly, anyone who has been through sex ed should know that condoms are highly effective in preventing HIV infection.  Oh wait ... except that abstinence-only education gets tons of funding (while comprehensive sex ed gets none) and so it is prevalent in our nation's schools despite the fact that it doesn't teach kids medically accurate information, it doesn't teach them how to protect themselves from sexually transmitted infections and abstinence-only programs actually spread misinformation and religious dogma.  Well, don't worry--McCain is also confused about his position on sexuality education.  After a long pause, he decided that he thinks he supports the president's policy.

By Tyler LePard  

In an appeal to the Republican Party's conservative base, John McCain said that he does not support the law that legalized abortion and that it should be overturned.  This contradicts his statements on the campaign trail in 1999 when he took a softer stance, saying that he "would not support repeal of Roe vs. Wade, which would then force x number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations."  

While in South Carolina, he also attended an abstinence-only rally for students, sponsored by a crisis pregnancy center (whose website compares the link between abortion & breast cancer with the link between smoking & cancer--a new twist on an old myth).

   

According to a recent poll, McCain is out of sync with over 60% of Americans who would not like to see Roe v. Wade overturned.

In his latest column for the New York Times, Paul Krugman discusses the way John McCain is cozying up with Jerry Falwell and the Religious Right. It used to be that McCain was an avowed enemy of these people and thought that they had no place in the Republican Party. His campaign against them was a campaign against them just as much as it was a campaign against Bush. But now, John McCain has flip-flopped. From being an enemy of the Religious Right, he had blatantly sucked up to Jerry Falwell, the very man who was the symbol of the evils John McCain was supposedly against.

You see, the problem is that John McCain is not knowledgeable when it comes to Iraq. So, the logical question is, what else is he not knowledgeable about? Apparently, he is not knowledgeable about social issues, either. So, instead of thinking for himself, he forfeits his credibility as a maverick and drinks at the halls of power with Jerry Falwell instead.

Remember when John McCain was considered to be one of the cool not-so-partisan Republicans?  Well those days are over.  He is not only becoming more and more of a partisan apparatchik every day, but he is revealing himself to be a supercilious weasel and a jerk as well.

Let's look at Senator Obama's good faith effort to engage McCain in dialogue on the question of lobbying reform:

Below is an expanded version of Floyd's column in the Nov. 18 edition of The Moscow Times.

Four years ago, George W. Bush quietly assumed dictatorial powers with a secret executive order granting himself the right to imprison anyone on earth indefinitely, without charges or trial or indictment or evidence, simply by declaring them an "enemy combatant," on his say-so alone. This week, the assemblage of bootlickers and bagmen that now befoul the U.S. Senate voted to codify the core of this global autocracy under the pretense of curtailing it.