Duty to Warn

The Bush era has brought a robust simplicity to the business of news management: Where possible, buy journalists to turn out favorable stories. And, as far as hostiles are concerned, if you think you can get away with it, shoot them or blow them up.

As with much else in the Bush era, the novelty lies in the openness with which these strategies have been conducted. Regarding the strategies themselves, there's nothing fundamentally new, both in terms of paid coverage and murder, as the killing in 1948 of CBS reporter George Polk suggests. Polk, found floating in the bay of Salonika after being shot in the head, had become a serious inconvenience to a prime concern of U.S. covert operations at the time, namely the onslaught on Communists in Greece.

Today we have the comical saga of the Pentagon turning to a Washington, D.C.-based subcontractor, the Lincoln Group, to write and translate for distribution to Iraqi news outlets booster stories about the U.S. military's successes in Iraq.

PEYOTE AND THE YANKTON SIOUX
By Thomas Constantine Maroukis
University of Oklahoma Press (Norman: 2005)
368 pages; $39.95 hardback; $14.95 paper.
ISBN 0806136162

The use of peyote has generated controversy among the white community for decades. But in Native America, particularly among the Yankton Sioux, it has been a constant source of deep religious conviction and contentment for the past 100 years.

In the past few months serious new medical studies have indicated that when used within the spiritual context of native traditions, peyote has no discernable negative health effects. In fact, the studies have confirmed that the "Peyote Road" can improve the well-being of the tribes and the individuals within them, helping many Native Americans escape the grip of that lethal white man's drug, demon alcohol.

Robert Greenwald's WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price is a potent and timely effort to awaken our inner conscious consumer. But the corporate ethics malfunction that we are experiencing goes far beyond Walmart, and pervades every aspect of our lives. There is nothing new about any of this. Arundhati Roy has worked tirelessly to point out that our spending habits play a significant part in supporting corporate empires and folks like Ralph Nader have been begging us to pay attention to our complicity in corporate plundering for years.

A law that will make democracy all but moot in Ohio is about to pass the state legislature and to be signed by its Republican governor. Despite massive corruption scandals besieging the Ohio GOP, any hope that the Democratic party could win this most crucial swing state in future presidential elections, or carry its pivotal US Senate seat in 2006, are about to end.

House Bill 3 has already passed the Ohio House of Representatives and is about to be approved by the Republican-dominated Senate, probably before the holiday recess. Republicans dominate the Ohio legislature thanks to a heavily gerrymandered crazy quilt of rigged districts, and to a moribund Ohio Democratic party. The GOP-drafted HB3 is designed to all but obliterate any possible future Democratic revival. Opposition from the Ohio Democratic Party, where it exists at all, is diffuse and ineffectual.

On Tuesday in New York, Jonathan Tasini will announce the launch of his campaign for United States Senate, challenging Hilary Clinton in the Democratic primary. 

A Democrat, at least one who convincingly opposes Bush, is very likely to win the general election in this race.  This means that the primary is the real election, and the question is what kind of Democrat we want to have in the Senate.

Behind curtain number one is Hilary Clinton, a pro-war, pro-CAFTA, pro-corporate health care Republicrat who's so very much more aggravating than most of them because of the widespread pretense that she's some sort of leftist or democrat with a small d.

Behind curtain number two is Jonathan Tasini, a veteran labor organizer and strategist who opposes the war, opposes corporate trade deals, proposes to expand Medicare to universal coverage, and can be counted on to fight for working people. 

Which kind of senator do the people of New York want?

And which kind of party do Democrats around the country want? 

AUSTIN, Texas -- Fellow procrastinators of the world, unite! Now is the time to begin thinking about Christmas shopping. We still have a few days left, so there's no rush for those who have been known to do it all on Christmas morning at the Jiffy Mart (everyone appreciates a nice can of WD-40).

For those who consider it wussy to begin shopping before the 24th, here's the annual Christmas book list -- the best one-stop shopping in town, items to suit all ages and personalities.

We prefer, of course, to shop at independent bookstores, but if a chain store is all that's available, it will do. Though there are no guarantees on the quality of the Christmas help: I once heard a woman ask for "The Odyssey" by Homer, to which the high-school honey hired for the holidays replied, "Uh, Homer Who?"

A fun book for almost anyone on you list is "Seabiscuit, An American Legend" by Laura Hillenbrand (Random House, $24.95). Unless you're a horse person, you probably think you don't want to read the biography of a racehorse, but you do want to read this one. It's a love of a book about a love of a horse.

Radically conservative Christians are attempting to shove a “Wedge” down the collective throats of Kansans, but some of us are not opening up and saying “Ahhhh”. As a parent of a sixth grader at a Kansas public school, I assert that the six conservative members of the Kansas State School Board are abysmal failures at ensuring the intellectual growth of our children and have grossly violated a sacred parental right.

In opening the door to introducing “Intelligent Design” into Kansas classrooms, the Kansas Board has advanced the “Wedge Strategy” of the Discovery Institute, which originated “Intelligent Design”. “Intelligent Design” is a “theory” which rests solely on the observation that the complexity of the world “proves” the existence of a Creator.

Per Discovery’s own internal document called The Wedge Strategy:

Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is expected to issue a ruling soon on a key piece of evidence that will help kick-start the long awaited criminal trial involving Houston-based Reliant Energy and the company's alleged scheme to boost its profits by shutting down power plants in California during the height of the state's energy crisis five years ago.

At issue are technical questions federal prosecutors have raised involving the definition of "market manipulation" as stated by California's grid operator, which US District Court Judge Vaughn Walker said could not be introduced as evidence by the prosecution.

The criminal trial - the first one related to state's two-year-old energy crisis - was scheduled to begin last month. It was postponed the day jury selection was set to begin, when prosecutors asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn Walker's ruling that market rules of the California Independent System Operator could not be used as evidence to establish what constitute normal wholesale power prices.

"Advice to Retirees: Embrace the future," syndicated columnist Tad Bartimus recently wrote in my local Seattle paper. Sounds good, but for Bartimus the future was a layoff, in a corporate cutback, from a 25-year career at the Associated Press news service. Faced with the Hobson's choice of agreeing to it or losing all health care access and pension benefits, she suddenly had to find ways to reinvent herself and survive, with less than half of her previously promised pension. She explores how her situation echoes the predicament of more and more Americans, like those who took middle-class futures for granted at companies such as General Motors, Delta Airlines, and Ford, but who now scramble to get by at jobs paying a fraction of the wages they were used to. America's social contract is being ripped apart, she writes-then she backs off to counsel individual adaptation and seeing life as "a banquet," where we need to savor even the unexpected courses.