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On Canada’s Freedomain Radio, an interview by Stefan Molyneux:

“As the author of The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), I never thought in my lifetime that I would see a president reach the depth of moral decay and depravity of President George W. Bush, but sad to say, our current president, Barack Obama, has managed to do it, and what makes it worse, as a former Constitutional law professor, he knows better.”

In 1945, as World War Two was winding down, Edmund Wilson wrote two
critical pieces dealing with the mystery novel. He was troubled by the rise in sales of a
form he thought commercial and crude. Indeed, in an earlier article writer about west
coast writers’ “The Boys in the Back Room,” he described James Cain’s work as
“ingenious in tracing from their first beginnings the tangles that gradually tighten
around the necks of the people involved in those bizarre and brutal crimes that figure
in American papers…” (newspapers).

Happy Halloween!

When readers wrote him to confirm that there was real literature between the covers
of so-called mystery novels, Wilson gathered up a pile of popular crime fiction by Nero
Wolfe and Earle Stanley Gardner, setting out to evaluate the field in a piece
titled ”Why Do People Read Detective Stories?” He said of Dashiell Hammett’s
The Maltese Falcon that it was “not much above those newspaper picture strips in which you follow from day to day the ups and downs of a strong-jawed hero and a handful of beautiful adventuresses.”

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
-Opening line in William Gibson’s Neuromancer

I recently took a tour of Best Buy to see what’s going on in the world of consumer electronics. Technology was on my mind. I had just been reading up on computer hacking and was getting to know a website called 2600.

It was all because of the latest WikiLeaks revelations and some email conversations I’d been having with fellow anti-war veterans about Bradley Manning. the young army intelligence specialist arrested and now imprisoned in Virginia for allegedly releasing the computerized trove of secrets. Some of my antiwar vet allies were finding it difficult to support Manning.

I agree with Daniel Ellsberg that Bradley Manning is an American hero who needs to be supported and defended. His private life is irrelevant. The same goes for the Australian founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange.

Whether or not the WikiLeaks revelations put anyone in danger is also irrelevant. It’s a red herring. Those who chose to go to war over other options and those who keep the wars going instead of ending them are the ones putting our soldiers and local Iraqis and Afghans in danger.

So many things have been happening in the news this week–The NPR Williams firing, the latest Wikileaks leak, Bank mortgage fraud, DU weapons fallout in Fallujah, a sane person running for Texas School Board, the deepening crisis of joblessness — I feel I should offer another perspective on them:

When I lived in China back in the early 1990s, it was entertaining to read the Chinese newspapers, all of them state-owned. In them, China’s government was always making excellent decisions, the economy was always improving, the leaders of other nations were always praising China’s leaders, and the economic “reform” initiated by that wise elder statesman Deng Xiaoping, was producing a miracle rebirth of the nation.

These stories were jarringly at odds with what I saw when I travelled to the countryside, and found that farmers were being expected to eke out livings for their families on plots of land smaller than the footprint of some Americans’ houses, that baby girls were being abandoned in orphanages when farm families bore a son, because of child-limit policies that made having a girl a big financial burden–especially since the tradition of girls going over to the family of their husband meant that not having a son could be a death sentence for parents in their old age. They were jarringly at odds too, with the misery I witnessed all the time among the tens of millions of rural migrants who flooded cities like Shanghai, Beijing, and other major metropolises looking for contract work, and with the appalling pollution of water and air (when I lived in Xi’an for five months, I could count the number of days I was actually able to see the round circle of the sun in daytime because of the perpetual smog that enveloped the city).

But say one thing about China. People there knew they were being fed a line of crap in their newspapers and on TV.

A victory for the government in a federal court in New York City Monday marks another slide deeper into Dick Cheney’s “dark side” for the Obama Administration.

In a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been seeking to force the Pentagon to provide information about all captives it is holding at its huge prison facility at Bagram Airbase outside Kabul in Afghanistan, Federal District Judge Barbara Jones of the Southern District of New York has issued a summary judgement saying that the government may keep that information secret.

The lingering question is: Why does the US government so adamantly want to hide information about where captives were first taken into military custody, their citizenship, the length of their captivity, and the circumstances under which they were captured?

Parwan Prison at Bagram Airbase, Afghanistan: Torture USA

As the author of The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), I never thought in my lifetime that I would see a president reach the depth of moral decay and depravity of President George W. Bush, but sad to say, our current president, Barack Obama, has managed to do it, and what makes it worse, as a former Constitutional law professor, he knows better.

This president’s moral nadir was hit yesterday, when he allowed a military tribunal based at Guantanamo to pressure Omar Khadr, a Canadian captured, gravely wounded, and arrested at the age of 15 in Afghanistan, and held at at Guantanamo now for nine years, to plead guilty to murder.

Khadr’s crime? He was in a house that was struck by a US air strike and then raided by US special forces during the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2002. The gravely wounded Khadr was accused of tossing a grenade at advancing US troops, which killed US Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, and caused another soldier to lose an eye.

Omar Khadr at age 15, the time of his capture by US forces

Although Khadr, after nine years of harsh confinement at Guantanamo, and facing a military tribunal, has pleaded guilty in a plea bargain, after insisting for nine years that he did not throw the grenade (there is no living witness to his having done so), one issue here is that even if he did toss it, that action would have been seen as that heroic act of a gravely-wounded young fighter facing a superior enemy force, but for the fact that the US is claiming Khadr was not a legitimate soldier, but rather a “terrorist.”

Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), head of the Tea Party Caucus in Congress, constantly dismisses charges about racism roiling within the ranks of the Tea Party, despite her fingerprints frequently appearing on racism-tinged stink bombs.

For example, Tea Party starlet Bachmann denies charges that racism is embedded in her demand made during a September Capitol Hill press conference for halting the long delayed $1.2-billion court-approved settlement to black farmers for documented discrimination by the US Agriculture Department.

Bachmann called for holding up that settlement, already stalled by US Senate Republicans, until a federal investigation examines her poorly substantiated claim of “massive and widespread fraud” in that pending settlement.

Bachmann’s name appears a few times in “Tea Party Nationalism,” the extensive report released recently examining Tea Party activities around America that documents the leadership roles of individuals in the tea-bag movement who also hold leadership posts in fringe organizations including anti-immigrant, pro-Nazi and white supremacist groups.

The government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and major social transformations to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the freedoms and individual rights we hold as fundamental today.
– Thurgood Marshall on the bi-centennial of the Constitution, 1987

On Saturday, October 9th at 7:31 in the morning, Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, picked up her phone and dialed Anita Hill’s Brandeis University office phone and left a taped message asking Professor Hill to pray and, then, apologize and explain “why you did what you did with my husband.”

Mrs. Thomas later described her call as an “olive branch.” Hill saw it differently and called the campus police and the FBI.

The phone call led to a front-page story in The New York Times and stories in other papers and on the web. It raised many questions as to why Mrs. Thomas did what she did. It also resurrected the sordid controversy of her husband’s appointment to the US Supreme Court.

So in August I went back to Wisconsin, which was glowing green under a brown cloud of mosquitos. Lotta water this past summer, and the most mosquitos since, oh maybe 1965, which is when the Schmoes first played in public at the ninth grade Halloween dance at Van Hise Junior High in Madison. We were called the Misfits then, and have been through a few name changes and personnel adjustments, but it’s basically the same five guys playing the same three chords for 45 years. After performing at our high school reunion party (Class of ’69) every five years over the decades, we figured, “Who knows these three chords better than we do? Isn’t it time we recorded an album?”

And we did. Three Schmoes (Bo Bally Schmoe, Timmy Schmoe and me, Chuck E. Schmoe) came back to Wisconsin, and joined the two Schmoes (Stevie Schmoe and Eddie Schmoe) who were still living there, and we recorded a whole album guided by the same light that has always illuminated our aesthetic path: No Good Songs Have Been Written Since We Went Through Puberty. I mean, why write new songs when Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs already wrote all the good ones?

The Schmoes on their new (and first) album cover