Duty to Warn

Journalists should be in the business of providing timely information to the public. But some -- notably at the top rungs of the profession -- have become players in the power games of the nation’s capital. And more than a few seem glad to imitate the officeholders who want to decide what the public shouldn’t know.

When the New York Times front page broke the story of the National Security Agency’s domestic spying, the newspaper’s editors had good reason to feel proud. Or so it seemed. But there was a troubling backstory: The Times had kept the scoop under wraps for a long time.

The White House did what it could -- including, as a last-ditch move, an early December presidential meeting that brought Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office -- in its efforts to persuade the Times not to report the story. The good news is that those efforts ultimately failed. The bad news is that they were successful for more than a year.

These days, editorials barely matter. Few people outside the professional political classes bother to read them. It's a form of writing as dead as the dodo, so we should find a specimen that is still in decent enough condition to be stuffed for the benefit of posterity.

By great good luck, the day after Christmas, the New York Times produced an absolutely perfect specimen of the editorial genre. Devoted to the elections in Iraq held on Dec. 15, it should be carted off at once to the Museum of Natural History and put in the "journalism" diorama next to the green eyeshade.

AUSTIN, Texas -- 2006 makes the ninth year in a row the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $5.15 an hour. It's bad economics, it's bad policy, it's stupid, it's unfair, and it's high damn time to do something about it. It is also, as Sen. Edward Kennedy says, a moral issue.

The Democrats have a new strategy that may finally get the Republicans off the pot. They're working to get a minimum wage increase on state ballots, including Ohio, Michigan, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Arkansas and Montana. The theory is that putting a minimum-wage increase on the ballot does for Democrats what putting on an anti-gay marriage proposition does for Republicans -- it gets out the base.

Of the seven states with the best chance to have minimum wage ballot initiatives, five were decided by less that 10 percentage points in the most recent presidential election. In theory, this should scare the happy pappy out of the Republicans, who will then vote to increase the minimum wage the first chance they get in Congress, thus assuring an increase either way. Clever, eh?

The U.S. military used white phosphorous as a weapon in Fallujah, and the U.S. military says such use is illegal.  That's one heck of a fog fact (Larry Beinhart's term for a fact that is neither secret nor known).  This fact has appeared in an article in the Guardian (UK) and been circulated on the internet, but has just not interested the corporate media in the United States.

  It interests Congressman John Conyers, however.  Last week, Conyers released a 273-page report titled "The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War."  This 273-page report covers many war-related crimes, including the use of white phosphorous.  http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/5769

The medieval town in which Arnold Schwarzenegger grew up has rightly rejected his medieval murder of Stanley "Tookie" Williams.

The Terminator's nickname has taken on a twisted new dimension. His Austrian home town is horrified, along with sane human beings throughout the rest of the world. Above all, this was a fascist killing.

For the full horror of what Schwarzenegger has done in American terms, we must hearken back to the witch trials of the 1600s.

In Salem and elsewhere in New England, Puritan fanatics took the loud hysteria of scheming adolescents as "evidence" of deviltry. In 1692-3 a score of citizens---nearly all of them women---were "convicted" of witchcraft.

The charges were sick and absurd. Many of the accused were esteemed grandmothers. Most were independent gardeners, farmers, craftspeople or in business for themselves. In many cases, family feuds or the coveting of land and property were at the core of the accusations.

AUSTIN, Texas -- The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Thirty-five years ago, Richard Milhous Nixon, who was crazy as a bullbat, and J. Edgar Hoover, who wore women's underwear, decided some Americans had unacceptable political opinions. So they set our government to spying on its own citizens, basically those who were deemed insufficiently like Crazy Richard Milhous.

For those of you who have forgotten just what a stonewall paranoid Nixon was, the poor man used to stalk around the White House demanding that his political enemies be killed. Many still believe there was a certain Richard III grandeur to Nixon's collapse because he was also a man of notable talents. There is neither grandeur nor tragedy in watching this president, the Testy Kid, violate his oath to uphold the laws and Constitution of our country.

The Testy Kid wants to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it because he is the president, and he considers that sufficient justification for whatever he wants. He even finds lawyers like John Yoo, who tell him that whatever he wants to do is legal.

The generation of American leaders who fought the American Revolution and crafted the United States Constitution examined the most important issues of government. They considered (1) war and peace, (2 ) the limits to government power vs. individual liberties, (3) how officeholders should be controlled by the citizenry and (4) the raising and management of public money. That generation devised impeachment to remove tyrants and corrupt officeholders from positions of public power based on their experience under the government of King George. Under the present circumstances, it is likely that they would vote to impeach and remove from office George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Bush deserves to be known as Liar-in Chief because he has not been honest with the American public on the most important issues of public policy for the past 5 years of his government. It is amazing that Republicans in Congress were willing to impeach President Bill Clinton over lying about an essentially personal issue over his sex life but are defenders of Bush when he is dishonest on the most important issues of government and public policy.

Sometime around 1850 my great-grandmother’s second cousin, James Lord Pierpont, wrote a song that for more than a century has been sung the most often in celebration of Christmas, especially by children. The song is “Jingle Bells.” A quick glance at its lyrics, however, reveals that Pierpont never once mentioned Christmas. “Jingle Bells” merely describes a winter scene and people frolicking in the snow, possibly on Washington’s Birthday (no, make that Presidents Day).

The illegal wiretaps authorized by the Bush Administration unnecessarily undermined American security by not following the legal requirements of court approval. The special law regulating national security wiretaps of potential foreign intelligence agents (and other potential enemies) permits wiretaps authorized by a special, highly secret court even after the wiretaps are in place.

The law gives the Executive Branch amazingly extensive powers and flexibility concerning national security wiretaps. There was simply no reasonable excuse for the Bush Administration for not following the lax guidelines established by this law. Not following the legal guidelines severely undermined the entire wiretapping operation by the National Security Agency. The Bush Administration demonstrated severe incompetence in the national security field with their obvious contempt for American law.