The information continues to abound that the McCain campaign represents a lobbyist bazaar in the worst tradition of corporate greed at the expense of gouging regular taxpayers.

Charlie Black, one of the pre-eminent figures of the presidential campaigns of George Bush the Elder, was reported as touching base with his lobbying interests while aboard the McCain campaign bus, which is ironically called "The Straight Talk Express."

In addition to working with a laundry list of major corporate forces, Black's efforts were also linked to the late Ferdinand Marcos, repressive dictator of the Philippines who was overthrown through mass demonstrations after trying to steal an election Republican style when international observers calculated he lost to Corazon Aquino, who rightfully succeeded to the office she won at the polls, by a 65 to 35 percent margin.

Lately, though, the major focus has been on McCain's leading economic adviser, Phil Gramm, as it should be considering the red flags that the former U.S. Senator from Texas has set off in the past while continuing to do so in the present.

For the ex-President Ronald Reagan's administration big business loved being able to do anything it wanted to, without being stopped by any government oversight.

In the early 1900's certain big business manufacturers didn't have much governmental oversight.  Child labor was not uncommon.  If an individual had the bad luck of an accident in one of the fast moving machines as the Industrial Revolution swung into high speed, any compensation was minimal, until some time later.

Labor laws were enacted guaranteeing fair and just compensation for accidents, such as losing a finger or other body parts.

!2-hour days were not uncommon.  It took workers' unions to bring abut the 40-hour week.  It took workers uniting to demand fair and just salary scales for labor.

Yesterday, May 31, Barack Obama criticized John McCain for his statement that the Iraq surge was working and that troop levels had diminished since it was instituted.

McCain, as typical, was dead wrong and Obama is to be commended for his criticism.  After leveling it, however, he moved into other terrain that proved considerably less firm.  

Obama criticized McCain for his failure to admit making a mistake, indicating that all political figures of any duration ultimately make them.  He noted that the problem was in failing to admit making mistakes and move on.

The next point Obama made was to draw an analogy between McCain and George W. Bush in Iraq.  He noted that Bush's serious problem was his failure to concede that he had made a mistake in Iraq.

The team that gave us a war based on deception to grab oil and expand empire, the team that has given us Abu Grhraib, waterboarding, rendition and unlimited torture and detention without trial, all of which are egregious criminal offenses under the U.S. Constitution dares lecture the rest of America and the world about honor!

In this case we are talking about more than "honor among thieves."  It is not that this label does not apply in the wake of rushing to war after Dick Cheney and the New World Order corporate establishment divided up the profits of war even before the first Donald Rumsfeld "shock and awe" attack was perpetrated.

It is just that the massive excess of the Bush-Cheney international criminal enterprise has reached such suffocating lengths that the term "thieves" represents a classic understatement.

Scott McClellan has revealed no more than what any reasonably well informed willing to pay attention and face the ugly facts already knows.  The big news is that an insider on the Bush-Cheney team has chosen to tell the truth, the same Scott McClellan who once questioned the patriotism and honor of Helen Thomas, the dean of White House correspondents.

David McKenzie of Federal Way, Washington in his letter to the Seattle Times Editors on May 30 wrote:

"O.K., Bush supporters, this time it isn't a `liberal whacker' saying it.  It's from a longtime Bush friend and loyalist who finally got a conscience.  Straight from former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, President Bush lied to the people to sell this tragic war in Iraq.  It has always been obvious to the majority, now even you have to open your eyes."

Were some American voters, along with certain members of the media brigade, complicit in the Iraq War debacle by vigorously backing Bush with their votes for Bush's second term?

Only each individual's conscience can answer.  The biblical yardstick to judge `right' and `wrong' is quite simple but all encompassing.  

Recent revelations from the upcoming book by former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan cite the increasing need to confront the impeachment issue immediately.

Congressman Robert Wexler of Florida has vigilantly pursued the necessity of impeachment hearings and of holding government officials, beginning with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, accountable for potential "high crimes and misdemeanors" under mandate of no less than the U.S. Constitution.

As so many continue to point out, this duty to pursue commission of high crimes and misdemeanors by those charged with upholding the U.S. Constitution violates that document and deems it necessary for them to answer such charges.  There is a duty to pursue such acts of grievous misconduct and, when the facts warrant, remove the responsible parties from their positions of power.

McClellan reveals that Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney lied about their roles in revealing the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson, actions constituting an obstruction of justice.  

In a startling article on excess population, Johann Hari in his column in London's Independent, revealed some sobering statistics:

"Every year world population grows by 75 million people - equivalent to another Britain and Ireland.  At the turn of the 18th century there were 600 million people on earth.  At the turn of this century there will be 6.6 billion."

This colossal overpopulation will find ever more people chasing after a diminishing degree of any resources left on the planet.  

During Ronald Reagan's presidency family planning funds for poor, enormously over-populated nations were cut off completely.  When television shows the poor fighting for food being dropped from planes for starving people, you get some idea what an inhumane decision that was.  

This was revealed in a Seattle Times article on May 18 by columnist Leonard Pitts Jr., a syndicated columnist with the Miami Herald.  This statistic appeared in Forbes Magazine according to Pitts.  Also, U.S. CEO's make many times more, especially in comparison to other workers, than their counterparts in any other country.

Pitts explained that the U.S. president's salary is $400,000 a year while a member of Congress makes $169,300 per year.  Pitts added his own view of the salary difference,  "If that's the going rate, if that's what is earned by the best and the brightest, who can be shocked that paying a tiny fraction of that often saddles us with the dumb and dumbest?"

He quoted a letter written by former Congressman Randy Cunningham of California to a reporter whose work helped send him to jail for taking $2.4 million in bribes.  This letter had been earlier excerpted by Rolling Stone Magazine:

"Each time you print it hurts my family and now I have lost them Along with Everything I have worked for during my 64 years of life.  I am human not an Animal to keep whiping.  I made some decissions Ill be sorry for the rest of my life. ... As truth will come out and you will find out how liablest you have & will be."

Now that John McCain has rescinded endorsements he previously exhorted from John Hagee and Rod Parsley a question emerges.

One of the big incentives along with holding the religious right voting bloc intact, hoping he will get the same kind of boost from it that George W. Bush had previously, was the financial clout that such big buck televangelists bring to a presidential campaign.

We learn about the forbearance that McCain and other rightist Republicans displayed toward Texan Hagee and Ohioan Parsley.  

Even after Hagee had revealed that New Orleans received the tragic jolt of Hurricane Katrina because the city was slated to stage a gay pride parade and that Catholicism represented the great whore, he continued to be defended by McCain and Texas U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison.

Robert Jackson was one of the exemplary figures in American history, not to mention one of the nation's greatest patriots and one of its greatest jurists.  

Here was the last of the great bootstrap lawyers like Clarence Darrow who did not attend law school but picked up their educations working under skilled lawyers and judges and achieved lasting greatness.

When it came time to pick someone to lead the U.S. team in prosecuting Nazi Germany at the Nuremberg Trials the ideal choice was then Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court Robert Jackson.  Those were the days when we had judges who were capable of independent thought and were not hacks pushed through the Washington process by the Federalist Society.

A basic principle enunciated by Jackson at the historic Nuremberg tribunal was that individuals were responsible for their acts and could not slide by with a variation of the Flip Wilson "The devil made me do it", which the late great comic meant as a joke and not something to be emulated.

A Seattle Post Intelligencer May 20 Letter to the Editors headlined Clifford J. Hutchins's letter with this caption:

U.S. SUPPORTED, ENCOURAGED, IRAQ'S WAR AGAINST IRAN

Hutchins's letter declared:

"American firms, with the blessing of the United States government, supplied Iraq with components for the development and manufacture of chemical and biological weapons, which were used to rain down death and destruction upon the Iranians.

How quick George W. Bush was to use the "appeaser" label on Barack Obama for his comment about speaking to those with whom one disagrees.

As Robert Parry was quick to point out, Bush's own family history should make him one of the last people to launch such an attack, given the record of his grandfather, banker and future U.S. Senator Prescott Bush, and his banking firm's helpful funding of the pig iron building element of Adolf Hitler Third Reich war machine.

There is another element to the latest throwing stones from his own glass house in this the latest huffing and puffing episode from Bush's pathetic fantasy land where confrontation with truth and logic result in swift banishment.

Bush, Cheney, Rove, Perle, Kristol and other members of the neocon Washington machine all believed that it was essential to secure victory in the Vietnam War if we were to keep the Asian wing of the vast Communist machine from America's front door.

Eric Schmitt and Tim Golden of the New York Times revealed the latest Bush administration plan for a larger prison for suspected terrorists.

A New York Times syndicated article appeared in the May 17 Seattle Times containing these revealing facts:

"The Pentagon is proceeding with plans to build a new 40-acre detention-complex on the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan.

"Officials (of the Pentagon) said in a stark acknowledgement that the United States is likely to continue to hold prisoners overseas for years to come."

Bob Lander of Mercer Island, Washington wrote this Letter to the Editors posted in the May 16 Seattle Times:

"As a combat infantry veteran of World War II, I commend President Bush for his decision to give up golf (out of his respect for veterans).  It spares military families the unseemly sight of the commander in chief goofing off from his grueling wartime schedule as their loved ones suffer and die.

"It's a compassionate decision.  Gutsy.  Patriotic.  Who among us could ask for anything more?"

Indeed, who among us in a nation of mere mortals could we ask a more demanding or agonizing sacrifice than for George W. Bush to give up golf to show his abiding respect for veterans and their families?

Walter Mondale stated it correctly when he was running against the Reagan machine as well as a vigilant mainstream media in 1984, explaining, "They know that if they ever ran on the issues they would lose, so what they do is try and trick the majority of the American people to vote against themselves."

Richard Nixon came out of the Navy in 1946 and made a quick peace time adjustment by waging war of his own.  His target was Congressman Jerry Voorhees, who was a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee with impeccable anti-Soviet credentials as the Truman administration rolled up its sleeves as the Cold War began.

Nixon's smear stalwarts impugned Voorhees's patriotism with series' of anonymous calls to people residing in the Whittier area district stating, "We just wanted you to know that your congressman, Jerry Voorhees, is a Communist."

Four years later Nixon and his fat cat benefactors decided it was time for him to move up to the senate.  This time his target was Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas and the same game was in active play.  Nixon uncorked his memorable barb of the campaign that "Congresswoman Douglas is pink right down to her underwear."