Congressman Barney Frank said recently that Barack Obama’s declaration that “there is only one president at a time” over-estimated the number. He was referring to the economic crisis. But where are you on the Gaza crisis where the civilian population of Gaza, its civil servants and public facilities are being massacred and destroyed respectively by U.S built F-16s and U.S. built helicopter gunships.

The deliberate suspension of your power to stop this terrorizing of 1.5 million people, mostly refugees, blockaded for months by air, sea and land in their tiny slice of land, is in cowardly contrast to the position taken by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. That year he single handedly stopped the British, French and Israeli aircraft attack against Egypt during the Suez Canal dispute.

Fatalities in Gaza are already over 400 and injuries close to 2000 so far as is known. Total Palestinian civilian casualties are 400 times greater then the casualties incurred by Israelis. But why should anyone be surprised at your blanket support for Israel’s attack given what you have done to a far greater number of civilians in Iraq and now in Afghanistan?

Confirmed visual reports show that Israeli warplanes and warships have destroyed or severely damaged police stations, homes, hospitals, pharmacies, mosques, fishing boats, and a range of public facilities providing electricity and other necessities.

Why should this trouble you at all? It violates international law, including the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter. You too have repeatedly violated international law and committed serious constitutional transgressions.

Then there is the matter of the Israeli government blocking imports of critical medicines, equipment such as dialysis machines, fuel, food, water, spare parts and electricity at varying intensities for almost two years. The depleted UN aid mission there has called this illegal blockade a humanitarian crisis especially devastating to children, the aged and the infirm. Chronic malnutrition among children is rising rapidly. UN rations support eighty percent of this impoverished population.

How do these incontrovertible facts affect you? Do you have any empathy or what you have called Christian charity?

What would a vastly shrunken Texas turned in an encircled Gulag do up against the 4th most powerful military in the world? Would these embattled Texans be spending their time chopping wood?

Gideon Levy, the veteran Israeli columnist for Ha’aretz, called the Israeli attack a “brutal and violent operation” far beyond what was needed for protecting the people in its south. He added: “The diplomatic efforts were just in the beginning, and I believe we could have got to a new truce without this bloodshed…..to send dozens of jets to bomb a total helpless civilian society with hundreds of bombs-just today, they were burying five sisters. I mean, this is unheard of. This cannot go on like this. And this has nothing to do with self-defense or with retaliation even. It went out of proportion, exactly like two-and-a-half years ago in Lebanon.”

Apparently, thousands of Israelis, including some army reservists, who have demonstrated against this destruction of Gaza agree with Mr. Levy. However, their courageous stands have not reached the mass media in the U.S. whose own reporters cannot even get into Gaza due to Israeli prohibitions on the international press.

Your spokespeople are making much ado about the breaking of the six month truce. Who is the occupier? Who is the most powerful military force? Who controls and blocks the necessities of life? Who has sent raiding missions across the border most often? Who has sent artillery shells and missiles at close range into populated areas? Who has refused the repeated comprehensive peace offerings of the Arab countries issued in 2002 if Israel would agree to return to the 1967 borders and agree to the creation of a small independent Palestinian state possessing just twenty two percent of the original Palestine?

The “wildly inaccurate rockets”, as reporters describe them, coming from Hamas and other groups cannot compare with the modern precision armaments and human damage generated from the Israeli side.

There are no rockets coming from the West Bank into Israel. Yet the Israeli government is still sending raiders into that essentially occupied territory, still further entrenching its colonial outposts, still taking water and land and increasing the checkpoints This is going on despite a most amenable West Bank leader, Mahmoud Abbas, whom you have met with at the White House and praised repeatedly. Is it all vague words and no real initiatives with you and your emissary Condoleezza Rice?

Peace was possible, but you provided no leadership, preferring instead to comply with all wishes and demands by the Israeli government-even resupplying it with the still active cluster bombs in south Lebanon during the invasion of that country in 2006.

The arguments about who started the latest hostilities go on and on with Israel always blaming the Palestinians to justify all kinds of violence and harsh treatment against innocent civilians.

From the Palestinian standpoint, you would do well to remember the origins of this conflict which was the dispossession of their lands. To afford you some empathy, recall the oft-quoted comment by the founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, who told the Zionist leader, Nahum Goldmann:

“There has been anti-Semitism the Nazis Hitler Auschwitz but was that their [the Palestinians] fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”
Alfred North Whitehead once said: “Duty arises out of the power to alter the course of events.” By that standard, you have shirked mightily your duty over the past eight years to bring peace to both Palestinians and Israelis and more security to a good part of the world.

The least you can do in your remaining days at the White House is adopt a modest profile in courage, and vigorously demand and secure a ceasefire and a solidly based truce. Then your successor, President-elect Obama can inherit something more than the usual self-censoring Washington puppet show that eschews a proper focus on the national interests of the United States.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

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President elect Barack Obama made choices today for “a broad and diverse team” in Chicago, reports the Associated Press. Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, former Gen. James Jones, Eric Holder, Janet Napolitano, and Susan Rice “round” out this “change” team which is, of course, not change but a seamless transition between the Bush neocons and Obama’s decidedly neoliberal choices.

Obama announces Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State.

Consider the following uncomfortable facts that the corporate media will never tell you in a month of Sundays:

Hillary Clinton: As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton will continue the Bush-Clinton legacy of mass murder and “humanitarian” interventions in “failed states,” that is to say states not toting the New World Order party line.

Clinton wrote for the Council on Foreign Relations publication Foreign Affairs that ending “the war in Iraq is the first step toward restoring the United States’ global leadership,” never mind her 2002 Senate vote allowing Bush and the neocons to invade Iraq and subsequently slaughter over a million Iraqis.

Clinton, as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has stated she wants to send more troops into the Afghan meat grinder and have them chase the CIA-created Taliban and al-Qaeda around. Afghanistan needs to get “as much, if not more attention” than Iraq, said Clinton earlier this year on a campaign stop in Cape Fear, North Carolina, an appropriately named venue.

“The next president will be the first to inherit two wars, a long-term campaign against global terrorist networks, and growing tension with Iran as it seeks to acquire nuclear weapons. The United States will face a resurgent Russia whose future orientation is uncertain and a rapidly growing China that must be integrated into the international system,” Clinton wrote for the CFR. In other words, the wars will continue, Iran will be “confronted” (bombed into submission), and Russia and China forced into the “international system,” in other words the bankster system that thrives on looting and imposed debt misery.

Clinton, as Secretary of State, will continue the phony GWOT indefinitely. “It is essential that we win this war against these borderless terrorists, but it is, I believe, critical that we once again recommit ourselves to that American internationalism that I mentioned in the beginning,” Clinton told Richard Haass and the Council on Foreign Relations in 2003. Internationalism, of course, is inseparable from neoliberal globalism of the sort the CFR has pushed for decades.

Robert Gates: More than anything, keeping Robert Gates on at the Pentagon is a signal to the plebs that the neocon policies of the Bush administration will stay in effect, albeit with a few minor changes and a lot of window dressing.

Gates is a loyal Bush senior stooge. During Bush 41’s presidency, Gates served as deputy national security adviser and then as CIA director. He was dean of the Bush School and then president of Texas A&M, which is where the Bush presidential library is located. “In other words, Bob Gates is a Bush 41 kinda guy,” writes Ivo Daalder.

Robert Gates is a consummate insider. “Gates indeed worked under every U.S. president from Richard M. Nixon to George Herbert Walker Bush,” notes the National Security Archive. He is closely connected to former Secretary of State James Baker III, a prominent CFR member and Bush crime family functionary and consigliere.

“The Iran Contra affair in which Robert Gates was implicated was part of the architecture of the ‘war on terrorism’. What is rarely acknowledged is that part of the proceeds of the illegal weapons sales to Iran were also used to finance the CIA sponsored Islamic brigades (i.e. Al Qaeda) involved in the Soviet-Afghan war. These covert operations in support of Al Qaeda paved the way for the ‘war on terrorism’ which constitutes the cornerstone of US National Security doctrine,” writes Michel Chossudovsky.

As Obama’s Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates will oversee the military aspects of this doctrine with an invasion of Pakistan and further involvement in Afghanistan.

Gen. James Jones: Former Marine general and former NATO supreme commander James Jones will be Obama’s National Security Advisor. Jones sits on the board of directors of the Boeing Company, Chevron, and NATO’s Atlantic Council of the United States. Jones is cozy with the Council on Foreign Relations. He is reportedly a good friend of John McCain and is respected by Republicans.

	Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano.

In essence, Jones will serve as Big Oil’s security chief. “Jones is currently a director of Chevron Oil. He also heads of the Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy — a group lobbying on energy issues in DC and described by the Grist as ‘part of the Republican machine, dominated by — and lobbying fiercely for the interests of — Big Oil, Big Auto, Big Pharma, and other such Bigs,’” writes Mitchell Anderson.

“Jones would be reflective of two huge Obama priorities,” notes Spencer Ackerman. “First, Afghanistan. As NATO Commander, Jones ceaselessly lobbied the European allies for greater assistance in the Afghanistan war. Second, energy security. Jones is widely known to be an advocate of alternative energy sources, and, as Politico notes, chairs an energy task force for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And of course there’s the good optics of such a well-respected general being Obama’s closest White House aide on foreign policy.”

Incidentally, even though former Sec. Def. Rumsfeld exiled Jones to his mostly ceremonial NATO post, the general is onboard with the coming attack against Pakistan and possibly Iran. During a September, 2006 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Jones testified that it was “generally accepted” that Taliban leaders operated out Quetta, Pakistan.

Finally, Jones “has pointed to Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo as a ‘model’ for US bases elsewhere,” writes Chad Nagle. “Anyone who has seen the gigantic and ominous Bondsteel, set amid the wasteland of bombed out and destitute Kosovo, has an idea of what the US-imposed New World Order will look like – destroyed dumps where a fortress houses thousands of American military personnel behind its walls and the fearful population outside can rot in hell.

It was, of course, the husband of Obama’s choice for Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, that turned Kosovo and the former Yugoslavia into a wasteland. An Obama administration promises more of the same.

Eric Holder: Former Clintonite and Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder will be Obama’s attorney general. Holder is probably best and infamously remembered for his role in the controversial pardon of billionaire fugitive Marc Rich, the FBI Most Wanted criminal who colluded with Iran at a time when that country was holding U.S. hostages.

In private practice as an attorney, Holder represents Merck and helped negotiate an agreement with the Justice Department for Chiquita Brands International in a case that involved Chiquita’s payment of “protection money” to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a group on the U.S. government’s list of terrorist organizations.

Most disturbing, however, is the role Holder played in the D.C. v. Heller ruling on handguns. Holder joined the Reno-led amicus brief, which urged the Supreme Court to uphold Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban and said the Department of Justice from Franklin Roosevelt through Bill Clinton had always believed that the Second Amendment does not protect the rights of individuals to own guns for personal use. In short, Holder is a gun grabber who is opposed to the Second Amendment. As attorney general, we can bet he will work tirelessly to outlaw all firearms in the United States.

Finally, Holder has advocated government censorship of the internet. “It is gonna be a difficult thing, but it seems to me that if we can come up with reasonable restrictions, reasonable regulations in how people interact on the Internet, that is something that the Supreme Court and the courts ought to favorably look at,” Holder told NPR after the Columbine massacre in 1999.

Janet Napolitano: Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano will be Obama’s Homeland Security secretary. She will continue the do-nothing approach to illegal immigration. “Far from being a border hawk, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano frequently blocked efforts to curb illegal immigration, say enforcement advocates concerned about her expected nomination to be the Homeland Security secretary under President Barack Obama,” reports Fred Lucas for CNS News. She opposes a border fence and favors a controversial technology visa program and favors a “stringent pathway to citizenship,” in other words allowing millions of illegal aliens to become citizens.

As a CFR member, Napolitano is onboard with the globalist agenda to impoverish the American worker. She has proposed endless H-1B visas in order to displace skilled workers. “I’m going to direct the Secretary of Labor to tell us what our labor market needs are, and we’re going to adjust the visas accordingly, and we’re going to put in place a process to do that, protecting jobs for American workers but realizing that we will have a national labor shortage moving forward. I’m going to pay specific attention to certain areas such as H-1B visas [for skilled workers], where there is such a demonstrated need and there’s more than enough work for everyone to go around,” Donald A. Collins quotes her as declaring.

Susan E. Rice: Ms. Rice, a former assistant secretary of state for African Affairs under Clinton and a Rhodes scholar, is a minion of the Brooking Institution. Brookings is a neolib “think tank” par excellence. It is funded by the Ford Foundation, the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, American Express, the Bank of America, Lockheed Martin, Walmart, Goldman Sachs, and the United Nations.

Rice, who the neocons consider a “leftist,” is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Strategy Group, the latter where she rubs elbows with the likes of Brent Scowcroft, the neocon Eliot A. Cohen (a “leading champion” of the war in Iraq), Madeleine Albright (a proponent of mass murdering Iraqi children), CFR president Richard N. Haass, and other crossover neocons and neolibs.

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The Obama disaster is already off to a good start.

Not only have stocks sharply fallen for another day as businesses continue to brace for lean times and heavy taxes under Obama’s rule. Unemployment may have reached a high but it is only a marker of how high it will really go once Obama and his cronies begins destroying the American economy and pocketing the loot.

As a sign of things to come, Obama has appointed a key figure in the Subprime mortgage mess, Rahm Emanuel, a former ethically challenged Clinton associate who sat on the board of Fannie Mac disregarding all calls for reform.

Despite protests from many Democrats and Obama supporters, Emmanuel is now set to play the leading role in an Obama administration that promises to address the economic crisis, despite his own role in causing it.

President-elect Barack Obama’s newly appointed chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, served on the board of directors of the federal mortgage firm Freddie Mac at a time when scandal was brewing at the troubled agency.

According to a complaint later filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Freddie Mac, known formally as the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, misreported profits by billions of dollars in order to deceive investors between the years 2000 and 2002.

Obama’s choice of Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff indicates that Obama will continue the same corrupt policies that caused the subprime mortgage mess in the first place as a reward for his financiers on Wall Street and off it, such as George Soros.

While the media is refusing to vet Rahm Emanuel, a man at the center of the sub-prime mortgage mess, it’s up to the American people to demand accountability from this ethically challenged administration.

By bringing in Rahm Emanuel, Obama is bringing over a fellow Chicago thug with a long experience with both dirty politics and dirty money. This is the sort of fellow Obama has decided will be a great Chief of Staff…

At a dinner to celebrate President Clinton’s first election victory, Mr Emanuel began to name those who he believed had earned his enmity. As he listed the names of those he saw as traitors, he grabbed a steak knife, stood up and began plunging the knife into the table and shouting “Dead! Dead! Dead!” after each name.

“When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape,” one witness recalled. “It was like something out of The Godfather. But that’s Rahm for you.

You can bet that wherever he is Rahm Emanuel is stabbing tables too and getting ready to stab people too in his new role as “Obama’s Godfather.”

The LA Times blog, hardly a right wing partisan source, describes Rahm Emanuel as a “political assassin” who “enjoys being a bad guy”

The Illinois congressman, after all, is best known as something of a Democratic political assassin. From his days as a top aide to President Clinton to his recent role leading the Democrats to a House majority, Emanuel has relentlessly attacked his foes and gone ruthlessly after anyone who stood in his way.

That’s just a taste from the War on America that we can expect from the Obama Administration, more Chicago style corruption and thuggery.

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Robbins was told on first arriving at the precinct that he would have to cast a provisional ballot. After an argument with a poll worker, he instead went to the City Board of Elections to obtain proof that he was registered.

“This is what you have to do to vote,” he said. “What happened was that my name was not on the rolls, and I’m not the only one. While I was waiting, thirty people…in the first five hours had been taken off the rolls…You do the math on that: Six per hour, per district, across America?”

Robbins, an anti-war Bush critic and activist as well as an actor, director, screenwriter and producer, won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor and a SAG award for his role in Mystic River. He also won the Best Actor Award at Cannes for his starring role in 1992’s The Player and co-starred with Morgan Freeman in 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption. He has two sons with actress Susan Sarandon.

The following video is from TMZ.com, posted November 4, 2008.

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CNN: Whoever wins the presidency today, he will face a lot of challenges. With a look at some of the obstacles facing the next President I’m joined by former Republican presidential candidate, Congressman Ron Paul. He joins me from Clute, Texas this morning. Glad you’re up with us, great to see you this morning

Ron Paul: Thank you, thank you very much.

CNN: As we take a look at how things are shaping up today, what are you thinking of, what are some of the things that stick out in your mind today?

Ron Paul: Well, I think the obvious is, what’s it going to be like with the new president, because we are going to get a new president. But the old problems are still going to be there. We’re still going to have to deal with the Middle East. We have the policy now where we’re going into Syria, we’re going into Pakistan, we’re threatening Iran, we’re having bad conditions in Afghanistan and Iraq, so, those problems are getting bigger by the day.

And also the financial situation is, you know, both candidates have supported the same old policy of pumping in 5 trillion dollars worth of new money, trying to prop up all the mistakes made over the last 20 or 30 years.

So, the American people have a lot to think about, and we do have a lot of concerns. Let’s hope things improve, but right now I don’t see any significant change in policy on the horizon.

CNN: Do you think that there’s a lot of promises that have to be made during an election cycle that one side, either gentleman, finally gets to the Oval Office, perhaps a lot of the things that have been promised aren’t necessarily going to be realistic to happen in this current environment?

Ron Paul: Well, I think that happens just about all the time. You noticed that neither candidate has talked about balancing the budget, but they sure have promised a lot of spending. No, nothing to be cut, spending is going to continue. And if deficits do matter, which I happen to believe, I mean, how can we expect any changes? Government is going to get bigger, more intrusive into our private lives, the foreign policy is going to remain the same, we’re gonna be the policeman of the world… So, really there’s no offer of solutions.

Obama talks about change, but what is he going to change? He and McCain agreed with the total bailout package, they don’t disagree on foreign policy, really, so the American people are going to be frustrated. They’re enthusiastic now and they’re hopeful and we all should be. But what’s going to happen after a month or two if each of these problems I’m talking about are much worse?

CNN: One of the things Congressman, as you talk a little about what we could see coming down the road, and whether things will change, there’s probably more of a chance of legislation at least being passed under an Obama administration if we do see the House and the Senate both go to a majority of Democrats, perhaps even a veto-proof majority.

And this is what former Senator Bob Kerrey wrote about this impact. He said,

“The primary threat to the success of a President Obama will come from some Democrats who, emboldened by the size of their Congressional majority, may try to kill trade agreements, raise taxes in ways that will destroy jobs, repeal the PATRIOT Act and spend and regulate to high heaven.”

Could single party rule actually be more detrimental to the country?

Ron Paul: Oh, I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. I think that’s one of the strongest arguments for voting for McCain. What this country needs is a little bit of gridlock on new legislation. You know, I think the only laws that we should be passing now, are laws that repeal legislation, repeal previous legislation, that’s what we need. So, no, I think it’s going to be sad if we don’t have any gridlock or any debate, I mean, if everything gets rubber-stamped, of course I wouldn’t mind a little bit of movement to get rid of the PATRIOT Act, that wouldn’t be too bad.

If they were doing the right things it wouldn’t be a problem, but right now there’s no evidence that we’re all of a sudden going to see a shift, that we’re going to see new policies, that we’re going to have a deep concern about the Constitution, that we’re going to talk about a non-interventionist foreign policy, that we’re going to talk about the Federal Reserve, the culprit in this whole financial mess. Nobody is talking about that, so, yes, I think if we rubber-stamp and see no gridlock and one party power I think it’s very bad for our country.

CNN: Alright, Congressman Ron Paul, it’s great to talk to you this morning, thanks for your take today.

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What difference is there between the crowds of flag-waving Republicans and the apparatchiks I covered as a reporter in the old East German Communist Party? These Republican delegates, like the fat and compromised party functionaries in East Berlin, all fawned on cue over an inept and corrupt party hierarchy. They all purported to champion workers’ rights and freedom while they systematically fleeced, disempowered and impoverished the workers they lauded. They all celebrated the virtue of a state that was morally bankrupt. And while they played this con game, one that gave them special privileges, power and wealth, they unleashed their goons and thugs on all who dared to challenge them. We are not East Germany, but we are well on our way. An economic meltdown, another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, a war with Iran, and we could easily swing into an authoritarian model that would look very familiar to anyone who lived in the former communist East Bloc.

A few of those arrested in St. Paul, including eight leaders of the RNC Welcoming Committee—one of the groups organizing protests at the GOP convention in St. Paul—now face terrorism-related charges. Monica Bicking, Eryn Trimmer, Luce Guillen Givins, Erik Oseland, Nathanael Secor, Robert Czernik, Garrett Fitzgerald and Max Spector could get up to seven and a half years in prison under the terrorism enhancement charge, which allows for a 50 percent increase in the maximum penalty. This is the first time criminal charges have been filed under the 2002 Minnesota version of the federal Patriot Act.

The Patriot Act, which was put in place as much to silence domestic opposition as to ferret out real terrorists, has largely lain dormant. It has authorized the government to monitor our phone conversations, e-mails, meetings and political opinions. It has authorized the government to shut down anti-war groups and lock up innocents as terrorists. It has abolished habeas corpus. But until now we have not grasped its full implications for our open society. We catch glimpses, as in St. Paul or in our offshore penal colonies where we torture detainees, of its awful destructive power.

The commercial media told us that what was important in St. Paul was happening inside the convention hall. The vapid interviews, the ridiculous soap opera sagas about Sarah Palin’s daughter and the debate about whether John McCain or Barack Obama has proprietary rights to “Change” divert us from the truth of who we have become. You had to search out “Democracy Now!,” TheUptake.org, Twin Cities Indymedia, I-Witness, along with a few other independent outlets, to see, hear or read real journalism from St. Paul.

It does not matter that the RNC Welcoming Committee describes itself as an “anarchist/anti-authoritarian” organization. We don’t have to embrace a political agenda to protect the right to be heard. Shut down free speech and radicals only burrow deeper underground, splitting ossified political systems into fractured extremes. We may well end up with the Christian right on one side, with politicians like Sarah Palin providing an ideological veneer to a Christian fascism, and embittered leftist radicals who turn to violence on the other.

St. Paul was not ultimately about selecting a presidential candidate. It was about the power of the corporate state to carry out pre-emptive searches, seizures and arrests. It was about squads of police in high-tech riot gear, many with drawn semiautomatic weapons, bursting into houses. It was about seized computers, journals and political literature. It was about shutting down independent journalism, even at gunpoint. It was about charging protesters with “conspiracy to commit riot,” a rarely used statute that criminalizes legal dissent. It was about 500 people held in open-air detention centers. It was about the rising Orwellian state that has hollowed out the insides of America, cast away all that was good and vital, and donned its skin to shackle us all.

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Other cities who hosted conventions in recent years – including Denver, Boston, New York and Philadelphia – either covered those costs from their general budgets or used tax money to buy insurance policies.

But St. Paul officials, led by Mayor Chris Coleman, insisted the committee use its private donations to purchase the insurance policy. They had some leverage because the party had named St. Paul as the location for the convention before striking the city services agreement in January 2007.

“The negotiating team, with the mayor’s encouragement, took the firm ground that we had to have the police professional liability insurance paid for by someone other than city taxpayers,” said City Attorney John Choi. “Ultimately, and reluctantly on the host committee’s part, we were able to secure that.”

The deal could save taxpayers millions. Police have arrested nearly 300 people, and many protesters are threatening lawsuits. New York City still faces more than 400 lawsuits from some of the 1,800 people arrested at the 2004 GOP convention, said Laura Postiglione, a spokeswoman in the city’s law department.

In St. Paul, some critics say the agreement has only encouraged police to use aggressive tactics knowing they won’t have to pay damages.

“It’s an extraordinary agreement. Now the police have nothing to hold them back from egregious behavior,” said Michelle Gross, who leads Communities United Against Police Brutality. She is considering filing suit after being handcuffed and searched last week during a raid of the St. Paul hub of an anarchist group.

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Officers on horseback, motorcycles and bicycles chased a group of rock- and bottle-throwing protesters who broke off from a peaceful march of up to 10,000 people through downtown St. Paul.

Protesters, some hiding their faces with black kerchiefs, smashed shop windows, overturned garbage cans and vandalized police cars. Some pushed a flaming dumpster into a car with police in it, officers and witnesses said.

Police said 130 people had been arrested. The charges ranged from trespassing to property damage and assault, a spokeswoman said. One officer was punched in the back and another was overcome by the heat, St. Paul police chief John Harrington said.

Demonstrators marched from the Minnesota state capitol to the heavily barricaded Xcel Center, where John McCain accepts the Republican presidential nomination later this week. Public safety officials put the crowd at 8,000 to 10,000.

Most protesters demanded an end to the Iraq war, although their causes ranged from increased rights for immigrants to changing U.S. policy in Ethiopia. T-shirts backing McCain’s Democratic rival Barack Obama were common.

Some carried signs supporting politicians like Republican Ron Paul, a libertarian-leading Texas congressman and former McCain opponent, and Ralph Nader, a consumer activist running for president as an independent.

The march wound past bus stops where advertisements from the Democratic National Committee showed Republican President George W. Bush and McCain hugging with the slogan, “Does this look like change to you?

The Republicans scaled back their convention festivities on the first day, aware that they risked a political backlash if they were shown celebrating as Hurricane Gustav pounded the country’s Gulf Coast.

Convention organizers held a truncated business-only session on Monday and scrapped a planned speech by Bush.

The absence of the president, whose nationwide approval ratings hover around 30 percent, did not deter the crowd.

Carrying a sign that said, “Hold Bush accountable,” Gary Frazee from neighboring Minneapolis said he suspected that the president was using the hurricane as an excuse to stay away.

“Why would he show up? There’s no love for him here,” he said.

Mary Gleason, a retired church musician from Minneapolis, said Hurricane Gustav “kind of worked in their favor. They won’t have to wait for Bush and (Vice President Dick) Cheney to say something stupid.”

As the protesters marched around the convention site, about 100 McCain supporters waved signs saying, “Let our soldiers win,” drawing spirited chants from the marchers, including “War is not pro-life.”

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Many who agree with me on a lot

of other issues, do not understand my enthusiasm for gold and sound money or why I spend so much time studying and talking about monetary policy.  It’s true that I talk about money differently than most, but the fact is sound money offers many benefits.  For example – peace.

Can sound money really bring about peace?  Actually, it plays a big part in peaceful international relationships.  Money based on commodities, rather than paper, is not subject to government manipulation, and is a key component to free and honest trade.  History shows that if countries engage in trade with each other, their governments tend to find ways to get along for the same reason you do not kill your customers at your place of business, even if they occasionally annoy you.  If someone outright cheats you, however, you may engage in “war” by taking them to court, for example, and the relationship will sour.  Governments and central banks with unfettered power to manipulate currency also have the ability to cheat their creditors.  One way they do this is to simply create enough currency to pay off debts.  This devalues the currency and “cheats” the recipient out of what they are owed.  It would not be fair if you watered down your product the way our government waters down its currency, so it is not hard to understand, in these simplified terms, why loose monetary policy contributes so much to ill will and war around the world.

Sound money, on the other hand, simply is what it is.  Removing governmental power to manipulate money, removes the temptation for government to spend, print and cheat.  Sound money ensures that our government’s spending priorities would be brought into sharp focus and reduced to only what we can afford.

Sound money also limits the ability to wage wars of aggression.  Imagine how much more careful Washington would have to be about starting a war if they did not have this financial sleight of hand at their disposal!  Fiat currency allows government do expensive things they should not be doing while paying the bills with cheap money.  The Federal Reserve has lately been auctioning off large amounts of treasury bills as a way to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our crushing entitlement burden.  The resulting devaluation of the dollar is quickly eroding our image as a good trading partner in the world.  As a consequence, there is therefore more talk of economic isolation and war.

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But at least there is still freedom of the press! Right? Apparently not. Here is how the donutmunchers dealt with ABC news producer Asa Eslocker. Mr. Eslocker was standing on a public sidewalk with a camera crew when Democratic Party officials were exiting a hotel. He was doing a story on major donors to the Democratic efforts and some of those major donors were coming out of the hotel. Police decided that he had no right to do that story and began by manhandling him and pushing him off the sidewalk into traffic. ABC News reports that the donutmuncher told Eslocker: “You’re lucky I didn’t knock the fuck out of you.” Here is some video of the incident. Welcome to America, land of the free. And, if you believe that, I have some swamp land in Florida for sale.

In this next video things are a bit sketchy but USA Today and Rocky Mountain News reported on the incident leading up to it. Alicia Forrest, 24, was watching a protest when a police officer yelled, “Back it up, bitch.” He then struck her with his baton causing her to fall to the ground in pain. After she got up she was being interviewed peacefully by reporters about the incident. Apparently those interviews were enough. The police are seen then rushing in and grabbing her and taking her away. That is one way to put an end to interview.

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KHOU reports that a Continental Airlines flight carrying seven U.S. lawmakers suddenly lost cabin pressure on its way from Houston to Washington, D.C.’s Reagan National Airport.

The flight recovered, was diverted and landed safely in New Orleans, according to one lawmaker’s spokesperson.

Aboard the flight among 117 other people with Rep. Paul were Reps. John Carter (R), Henry Cuellar (D), Nick Lampson (D), Solomon Ortiz (D), Ted Poe (R), and Ciro Rodriguez (D), all representing Texas in the U.S. House.

The airline confirmed that no one was hurt, the report said.

This video is from CNN’s Situation Room, broadcast July 22, 2008.

Download video

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In response to mounting media questions about the failure of the Barack Obama presidential campaign to produce the presumptive Democratic nominee’s birth certificate, an official spokesman of the campaign has endorsed as genuine the image of a document purporting to be his “birth certificate.” But some who have examined that image in high resolution claim inconsistencies and irregularities which suggest that the purported document is a forgery. Its high profile use by the campaign, they claim, suggests an attempt to conceal the truth of Obama’s birth circumstances and citizenship qualifications from the American people.

The campaign has posted only a low-resolution image of that document, which it claims is his “birth certificate,” on its “Fight the Smears” website, along with purported proof of why the claim that Obama may not qualify as a “natural born citizen” is false:

—
Lie:
Obama Is Not a Natural Born Citizen

Truth:
Senator Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961, after it became a state on August 21st, 1959. Obama became a citizen at birth under the first section of the 14th Amendment
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside….”
—

Contrary to the campaign’s claims, the issue of when Hawaii became a state and the wording of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, are not at issue.

Rather it is Article Two, Section One of the Constitution which requires that the President be a “natural born citizen” and not simply a naturalized citizen. The issue is whether there is proof that Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961, the legal status of his mother at the time, and what exactly is written on the original birth certificate — if it in fact such a certificate exists.

Some bloggers have claimed that the purported official State of Hawaii document, originally published by the radical left Daily Kos blog, is a fake, and a poorly executed one at that.

Examination of the higher resolution of the image indicates irregularities which suggest to some that the purported “certificate” may be a forgery produced or modified by Photoshop or another image-editing software, and not a genuine item.

“I can confirm that that is Sen. Obama’s birth certificate.” Ben LaBolt, an Obama campaign spokesman, to the Los Angeles Times.

The evidence, presented in greatest detail by the blogger Polarik at TownHall, includes:

1. Use of a second generation reproduction of the seal of the State of Hawaii at the top
2. Blacking out of the Certificate number in an attempt to prevent it from being traced
3. Absence of any official signature or seal which typically appear on such documents
4. Crudely arranged borders inconsistent with a professionally produced official document
5. Crude overlay of the textual items on top of the patterned background, indicating that the background was produced first and then the textual images laid on top of it by a graphical program rather than being scanned from the original.
6. Failure to use the double-S symbol before the listing the relevant statute (HRS 338-13b) as appears in official uses of the State of Hawaii.
7. The appearance of the backward facing text “Jun 6, 2007″ that appears to come from a stamp in the lower right hand portion of the document.
8. The description of his father’s race as African, when the term Negro was reportedly used at the time of birth.
9. The use of an identical typeface for all text items on the page.

Even if one or two of the above irregularities may have an explanation, they claim, the aggregate points to an amateurish attempt to manufacture an official-looking document that may not exist in the official records of the state of Hawaii.

On its face, this document does not even presume to be a copy of the original birth certificate — contrary to the claims of the Obama campaign — but rather a secondary Certification of Live Birth, which may be used when the original birth certificate can’t be located, and can be produced after the fact with just the affadavits of a family member, or even the child himself.

The Obama campaign, however, has not even produced a paper version of this document, and indeed it does not even publish the high resolution version that appeared on the Daily Kos. It has not fulfilled the media’s persistent requests to produce the original Birth Certificate, or to respond to media questions about the birth certificate controversy.

What could be the Obama campaign’s motive for withholding the original birth certificate and passing off instead a crudely forged facsimile of a “Certification of Live Birth”?

Speculation in the blogosphere and mainstream media is rampant that the concealment is for one or more of the following reasons:

1. There is no proof that Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961.
2. The father listed on the birth certificate is not Barack Hussein Obama.
3. The father’s race is listed as something other than African, perhaps Muslim or Arab.
4. The mother was no longer at that time an American citizen.
5. The child’s name is not listed as Barack Hussein Obama II.

Jim Geraghty, reporting on the Campaign Spot blog of the National Review and one of the original writers on the controversy, cited the “rumor” that Obama was born not within the United States, but elsewhere, possibly Kenya.

Geraghty stated that “If Obama were born outside the United States, one could argue that he would not meet the legal definition of natural-born citizen — because U.S. law at the time of his birth required his natural-born parent (his mother) to have resided in the United States for ‘10 years, at least [f]ive of which had to be after the age of 16.’”

He then points out that Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, was 18 when Obama was born “so she wouldn’t have met the requirement of five years after the age of 16.”

According to FindLaw.com, cited by Geraghty, the requirements that were in force from Dec. 24, 1952 to Nov. 13, 1986, encompassing the time of Obama’s birth, state, “If only one parent was a U.S. citizen at the time of your birth, that parent must have resided in the United States for at least 10 years, at least five of which had to be after the age of 16.”

Geraghty said the Obama campaign could “debunk” the rumors about his birth simply by releasing a copy of his birth certificate, but the campaign has so far chosen not to do that.

The seriousness of this latest controversy cannot be underestimated. Unlike the scandals related to Obama’s various associations with unsavory characters, or claims about his Muslim upbringing, the issue here relates to his citizenship and legal qualification to run for President of the United States.

One would have thought that the most basic documentary proof of the location and date of his birth should be a basic and non-controversial requirement for any presidential candidate, and part of the public record, much more so than one’s tax return or annual checkup. It is almost incomprehensible that they would withhold this information — unless there is something to hide.

Ironically, a similar controversy surrounded Obama’s likely opponent in the Presidential race, John McCain. McCain was born to two American parents, one of whom was serving in a US military hospital in the Panama Canal Zone.

This Washington Post column on “Citizen McCain’s Panama Problem?” examines the issue:

“McCain was indeed born in the Canal Zone, and Article II of the Constitution plainly states that ‘no person except a natural born Citizen… shall be eligible to the Office of President.’

“Some might define the term ‘natural-born citizen’ as one who was born on United States soil. But the First Congress, on March 26, 1790, approved an act that declared, ‘The children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond sea, or outside the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural-born citizens of the United States.’ That would seem to include McCain, whose parents were both citizens and whose father was a Navy officer stationed at the U.S. naval base in Panama at the time of John’s birth in 1936.”

But the issue is not legally closed, and therefore this year, as reported in the legal column of the Wall Street Journal a non-binding resolution was introduced and passed affirming that McCain qualifies as a “natural born Citizen,” as specified in the Constitution and is therefore eligible for the highest office in the land. Ironically, the resolution was co-sponsored by Barack Obama.

About McCain, of course, there is no question about the facts surrounding his birth, but over their legal significance. He is not denying that he was born in Panama, or posting certificates that claim he was born in Florida. Obama’s campaign, on the other hand, seems intent on evading the need to produce and submit to public scrutiny the official document that could prove that his qualification to run for President according to the Constitution.

The cloud of controversy, of course, could be dispelled with ease, of course, if Obama would release the real documentation of his birth, or even the original printed version of the online document the campaign claims as genuine. And yet the campaign is sticking by its guns, despite the evidence from the blogosphere pointing to the forgery and inadequacy of the proffered image of the non-birth certificate. Ben LaBolt, an Obama campaign spokesman, told the LA Times: “I can confirm that that is Sen. Obama’s birth certificate.”

Validation for the authenticity of the image is provided by a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, who reportedly emailed the image and got a confirmation from an official in the Hawaiian Department of Health. “It’s a valid Hawaii state birth certificate,” spokesman Janice Okubo is quoted as telling the reporter.

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Scarborough explained that Clinton failed to meet recent expectations and that, just as with corporate earning statements, that’s what counts.

“You don’t want this to end, do you?” Hanes asked in conclusion.

“Of course not,” Scarborough replied. “I want the Stones’ Street Fighting Man played in the background while I monitor the streets of Denver with tear gas, the ghost of Abbie Hoffman rising up over the auditorium. Yeah, baby, I want a fight — on both sides”

This video is from MSNBC’s Primary Coverage, broadcast May 6, 2008.

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