Today's Stories

October 24 / 26, 2008

Mike Whitney
Down for the Count

October 23, 2008

Allan J. Lichtman
What Voter Fraud?

Todd Chretien
Why I'm Not Voting for Obama

John Ross
No Child Left Behind, Mexican-Style

Peter Morici
Strategies to End the Crisis

Mats Svensson
Short Film Clips at a Checkpoint

Marlene Martin
Don't Let Them Execute an Innocent Man

Robert Jensen /
Pat Youngblood
Looking Beyond the Election and Beyond Elections

Margaret Kimberley
Rightwing Obama Love

Deepak Tripathi
Post-Bush Scenarios

David Morris
Why Joe the Plumber is a Socialist (And You Are, Too)

Website of the Day
Voting While Black in North Carolina

October 22, 2008

Brian Cloughley
Kid Killers are Barbarians

Heather Gray
Raising Hell in the South: the Legacy of J. L. Chestnut, Jr.

Jeff Birkenstein
McCain's Disdain for Spain

Ralph Nader
The Song Remains the Same: Convergence and Avoidance in the Presidential Election

DC Larson
The Growing of a Heartland Nader Raider

David Swanson
Colin Powell, Not Qualified for Government Service

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor Race and the Election: When the "Real" America Enters the Voting Booth

Larry Everest
9/11 and the Imperial Adventure in Afghanistan

Robert Fantina
Anything to Win

Martha Rosenberg
The Financier's Playbook

Stephen Martin
Giving It Up to the Combine

Website of the Day
Brokers with Hands on Their Faces

October 21, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Wealth's Apostles

Paul Craig Roberts
How Inflation Works: Why I Can't Buy an Old Ferrari

Corey D. B. Walker
Empire and White Supremacy

Steve Breyman
How to "Win" in Afghanistan

Eric Toussaint
The Economic Crisis and Latin America: Time to Delink

Wajahat Ali
Boo Radley Comes Out to Play: the Emerging Muslim-American Electorate

Robert Weitzel
Wasting a Vote for Lincoln's Radical Ideal (Or Why I'm Voting for Nader)

Brendan Cooney
Palinoscopy: an Exploration of Why Liberals are So Obsessed with Sarah Palin

Dave Lindorff
Cuba's Oil Reserves: a Game-Changer?

Marqueece Harris-Dawson / Bob Wing
When You're a Black Candidate There's No Such Thing as a Safe Lead

Patrick B. Barr
Socialist, Socialist, SOCIALIST!

Omar Barghouti
The Boycott and Palestinian Groups: Countering the Critics

Website of the Day
How to Dismantle a US War Plane (and Get Away With It)

October 20, 2008

Michael Hudson
The ABCs of Paulson's Bailout

Anthony DiMaggio
The Scandal That Never Was: ACORN, Rightwing Media and Election "Fraud"

Tariq Ali
Zardari Bans My Books

Uri Avnery
Is Akko Burning?

Bill Quigley
Hammered by the Swedes

Ben Rosenfeld
The Politics of St. Joe, Martyr to a Lie

David Michael Green
Payback's a Bitch: McCain on the Ash Heap

William S. Lind
The Afghanistan Advantage

Chris Genovali
Drill, Baby, Drill (Wink, Wink)

Stephen Martin
The Last Man in America

Howard Lisnoff
Bad News for War Resisters

David Yearsley
Organ Meat

Website of the Day
Our Brother is Sick: the Steve Ferguson Cancer Fund

October 17 / 19, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Blow Ups and Bombers

Jeffrey St. Clair
Inside Hanford: a Trip to America's Most Toxic Place

Pam Martens
How the Banksters are Making a Killing Off the Bailout

Paul Craig Roberts
Government of Thieves

Mike Whtney
No More Investment Banks

Michael D. Yates
Bowling Alley Blues: Racism Dies Hard in Johnstown, PA

Suzanne Smith
The Energy-War Connection: McCain Said It, Why Don't We?

Carl Boggs
Prosecuting Bush

Ralph Nader
Closing the Courthouse Doors

Fidel Castro
The Global Crash

Dave Marsh
The Great Levi Stubbs

Saul Landau
Denial, the Election Musical Comedy

Jo Guldi
The Floods of Heaven

Kevin Zeese
Now the Cost of War Really Matters

Larry Everest
Afghanistan, Not a Good War Gone Bad

Steve Early
Stop, in the Name of Joe!

David Macaray
Hey, Joe

Ben Terrall
When Ike Hit Haiti

Missy Beattie
Palin and God's Children

Don Monkerud
American Exceptionalism

Helen Redmond
Health Care Now's Big Con

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Delta Vision: Canals and Dams to Bail Out Big Ag

Wajahat Ali
Bush Gets Stoned

Farzana Versey
The White Tiger's Stripes and Gripes

Vladimir Frolov
Medvedev to Obama: We Come Not to Bury America, But to Buy It

Kim Nicolini
Frozen River: At Last, a Great Movie That's Neither Hip Nor Cool

Poets Basement
Gibbons, Corsale, Davis and Fleming

Website of the Day
The Real Sarah Palin?

October 16, 2008

Mike Whitney
The End of Friedmanite Economics: an Interview with Robert Pollin

Jonathan Cook
The Acre Riots

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Is Obama Playing to the Gallery? Or Has He Lost the Plot in South Asia?

Alan Maass
A Supreme Injustice: the Death Penalty Case of Troy Davis

Chuck O'Connell
Our Needs Do Not Fit on Their Ballots

Mary Lynn Cramer
Krugman's Prize: Iconoclast, Apologist or Propagandist?

P. Sainath
The Race May be Over, But Race Isn't

Andy Worthington
The Shrinking Case Against Binyam Mohamed: Justice Department Drops "Dirty Bomb Plot" Allegation

Peter Gelderloos
Enric Duran, the Good Thief?

Stephen Martin
The Nourishment of Idleness: Where Has All the Money Gone?

Douglas Valentine
Why I'm Voting for Obama

Website of the Day
The Mormon Worker

October 15, 2008

Steve Conn
The Real Story of Troopergate

William P. O'Connor
The Legend of John McCain

Robert Weissman
The Partial Nationalization of US Banks: Public Ownership, But No Public Control

Jonathan M. Feldman
Before the Second Wave of Crisis: an Alternative to the Triple Failure

Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Race in America: Is a Vote For Obama a Vote Against Racism?

Conn Hallinan
Targeting Unions in Colombia

Justin Podur
The Financial Economy and Real Economy

Karl Grossman
The New Nuclear Navy

Dave Lindorff
Is the Government Really Turning Socialist?

Eric Walberg
The Quiet Russian

Martha Rosenberg
Of Blood and Eggs

Uri Avnery
A Fairy Tale

Monica Benderman
No More

Website of the Day
Contractor Misconduct Database

Weekend Edition
October 24 / 26, 2008

Sarah Palin, Special Needs and Identity Politics

Manufacturing Sympathy

By SCOTT BOEHM

As the older brother of someone with Down Syndrome, I’ve been intrigued by Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s use of her son Trig during the campaign.  It’s strange to listen to her speak so tenderly about the “special love” that special needs children bring into the world on the heels of Republican rallies resembling lynch mobs, often incited by her characteristic vitriol.  On Friday, Palin gave her first policy speech, which was—not surprisingly—dedicated to issues confronting special needs families.  Watching it live on FOX News, I couldn’t help but wonder if something was wrong with my television as she proceeded to announce how profoundly being the parent of a child with Down Syndrome has touched her life.  It was the perfect advertisement for compassionate conservatism.  Who could criticize this dedicated mother of a special needs baby?

It’s tough.  In her emotional speech, not only did Palin announce that she supports fully funding the Individuals with Disabilities Act, she also stressed that she would fund more school services to meet the demands of special needs students, strengthen the National Institute of Health so that every family has a place to go for support and guidance, and modernize the Vocational Rehabilitation Act so that special needs adults can live independently if they are able and choose to do so.  It sounds like the dream of every special needs family.

So what’s the problem?

First of all, if elected, Sarah Palin will report to a powerful boss in the White House who has repeatedly called for a government-spending freeze during what is shaping up to be a long economic crisis.  During the last presidential debate, Senator John McCain praised Palin’s dedication to the special needs cause and commended what she has accomplished for the community as governor of Alaska.  Senator Barack Obama also applaud Palin for increasing spending to special needs programs, but quickly pointed out that he doesn’t understand how McCain would pay for doing the same thing across the nation if elected President—a contradiction worth exploring further.

It seems to me that with Palin we’re seeing a new type of identity politics in which the Republicans are exploiting her image as a special needs advocate in order to win the votes of special needs families and appear like caring, compassionate conservatives—while avoiding the actual phrase Bush made popular during his 2000 campaign.  It is easy to understand the appeal of this tactic within a special needs community that has been repeatedly letdown by both Republican and Democratic administrations.  With Palin, at least, comes something crucial to identity politics: visibility.

However, Obama’s question remains.  How will a McCain administration pay for greater special needs programs if McCain declares a spending freeze?  Furthermore, in the same debate, Obama pointed out the massive expense of the war in Iraq, stating that the U.S. government needs that money to improve such domestic programs.  So while the McCain camp attempts to manufacture sympathy for Palin’s teary-eyed speeches about special needs, in which she rightly claims that “the truest measure of a society is how it treats it’s most vulnerable,” all the evidence seems to indicate that sympathy—not federal dollars, which would smell too much like the stinky socialism that both Palin and McCain have been busy denouncing—is all that special needs families can expect from President McCain, at least during the on-going economic crisis or until the end of the war in Iraq, which McCain once famously claimed could last another 10,000 years.  And then there is that possibility of bomb, bomb, bombing Iran…

So while it is all well and good to talk about supporting special needs families and to grant visibility to an overlooked population, it doesn’t much matter if in the end it’s all a campaign strategy to counter dominant images of a hostile, racist and militaristic ticket.  Such politics is insulting to the very families that Palin seeks to speak for.  The attempt to manipulate special needs families into a means to achieve dark objectives—just as Palin’s poor baby Trig is being exploited by Republican spin doctors—is demeaning and yet another form of dirty politics being practiced by a desperate McCain campaign.

Yet as a member of a special needs family, the thing that bothers me the most is that while Palin herself claimed in Friday’s speech that she and her family will learn far more from Trig then he will from them, it was obvious to me that she hasn’t learned much so far.  During 28 years of contact with the special needs world, the values I’ve seen demonstrated by people with Down Syndrome are radically different from the values I’ve seen on display on the Republican Party campaign trail this year.  Hate, deceit and fear mongering is not something I associate with my brother and his special needs friends.

But don’t take my word for it.  Take a minute to read Dennis McGuire’s 2005 National Association of Down Syndrome plenary address, “If People with Down Syndrome Ruled the World”.  Among other things, based upon his experience as the Director of Psychosocial services at the Adult Down Syndrome Center in Park Ridge, Illinois, McGuire believes that if people with Down Syndrome were in charge, “People would be refreshingly honest and genuine,” and “anger would only be allowed in special sound proof rooms.”  And to the big question, “If people with Down syndrome ran the world, would there be wars or murders?” McGuire answers with an unequivocal, “We don’t think so!”

Sounds like a far cry from Palin’s usual campaign speeches, as well as McCain’s bloody agenda.  Perhaps Palin should stop flaunting her son on the campaign trail, and actually take the time to learn the lessons she insinuates she’s already learned from him.

Scott Boehm is a Ph.D. Candidate in Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of California, San Diego and a freelance writer.  He can be contacted at sboehm@ucsd.edu.

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