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Sensational New Print Edition of CounterPunch
Amazing Plan Surfaces: "We Need Ethno-Weapons!"

David Price tells how top-flight US anthropologists eagerly obeyed US government's mandate to "think in a-moral terms". One scheme of OSS's willing executioners: target Japanese physical "weak spot", the respiratory tract, with anthrax germs. Gabriel Kolko asks What's so New About the Neo-Cons? If they had not existed, would the policies have been the same? Jeffrey St Clair digs up more dirt on Halliburton's secret history. Alexander Cockburn on why we need more "celebrity justice". Get the answers you're looking for in the latest subscriber-only edition of CounterPunch ... CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now!

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Today's Stories

July 2 / 4, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
"Bomb Teheran!" Urges Jilted Condi?

Lenni Brenner
Jefferson, God and the Fourth of July

Laura Carlsen
Zapatista's Red Alert

James Petras
The Pretensions of Neoliberalism: Six Myths About the Benefits of Foreign Investment

William A. Cook
Kings of Serpents

Brian Cloughley
Quagmire of the Vanities

Saul Landau
The Mass Media, Symbols and Ownership

Tom Crumpacker
Who Has What to Hide About Luis Posada Carriles?

Greg Moses
Dylan's America

Dr. Susan Block
My Adelphia Story: a Tale of Censorship, Fraud, Christian Family Values and Really Lousy Cable Service

Fran Shor
Disassembling Bush's Iraq War: Liberated into a No Man's Land

Fred Gardner
Study: Smoking Marijuana Does Not Cause Lung Cancer

Moshe Adler
The New London Case: Corporate Giveaways That Destroy Communities, But Don't Create Jobs

David Model
The Downing Street Memo: So What's New?

Seth Sandronsky
California Spying, Schwarzenegger-Style

Ramzy Baroud
Managed Democracy in the Middle East

Suzan Mazur
Frank Carlucci the First: the "Sublime Prince" of Scranton

Ben Tripp
Voltaire, I Can Dig Your Rap

Justin Taylor
Faux Biography and the Pleasures of "Lint"

Brendan Bailey
Mesh Caps, Vice Magazine and the Trouble with Irony

Poets' Basement
Albert, Engel and Louise

Website of the Weekend
Radical Reference

 

July 1, 2005

Christopher Brauchli
With Friends Like These: Bush Buddies Karimov and Musharraf

Pat Williams
What Real Westerners Think About Bush's Pseudo-Cowboy Palaver

Gary Leupp
Summer Surprise?

John Stauber
Mad Cow in America: the USDA Continues to Lie

John Chuckman
The Blessings of Canada

Justicia y Paz
Colombia's Disappeared: Their Names, At Least!

Cockburn / St. Clair
It's Put Up or Shut Up for Bush and the Dems on the Supreme Court

 

June 30, 2005

Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to Carl Levin: Compassion for Iraqis

John Stauber
Oprah Not the "Only" Mad Cow in America

Virginia Rodino
All Roads Lead to Baghdad: Unity in the Anti-War Movement

Jason Leopold
Meet the New Chair of the FERC: James Kelliher, the Man Who Invited Enron to Write Bush's Energy Policy

Dave Lindorff
What Was Bush Thinking?

Greg Moses
Racism at Cape Cod

Norman Solomon
Memo to the Iraq War

Joshua Frank
Israel's Theocrats

Alexander Cockburn
The Political Function of PBS

 

June 29, 2005

Mike Schaefer
How the Washington Post Lied About Its Own War Poll

Roger Burbach / Paul Cantor
Bush's Big Democratic Hoax in Iraq

Sharon Smith
Democrats Shift into Reverse

Sam Husseini
A Quick Way to End the Insurgency

John Stauber
Put a Photo of Mad Cow #2 on a Milk Carton

Ahmad Faruqui
Is Militarism Irreversible in Pakistan?

Linda S. Heard
Bush's Speech: the View from Cairo

Stew Albert
Chet Helms: a Rock and Roll Hero

Ray McGovern
Bush at Ft. Bragg: Stay the Crooked Course

June 28, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
A Defeat Bred in Deceit

Landau / Hassen
Bush's Meddling in Internal Syrian Politics

John A. Murphy
Keeping Nader Off the Ballot: an Analysis of Political Profiling in Pennsylvania

Mike Whitney
More Lies from Rumsfeld: Those "Meetings" with Insurgents

CounterPunch News Service
JFK on Staying in Vietnam: Is Bush Reading from Kennedy's Playbook?

Dave Zirin
Pining for the Pistons

Dave Lindorff
Showtime in Washington

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq: a Bloody Mess

 

June 27, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
Blood Sacrifices for Empty Slogans

Mike Marqusee
G8: Who are the Hijackers?

Mark Scaramella
When a Corporate Raider Claims Economic Hardship: the Court-Approved Lies of Charles Hurwitz

Leigh Saavedra
Press Apologists for Torture

Kathy Kelly
Where is the UN?


June 25 / 26, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
The Supreme Court's Jackboot Liberals

Jennifer Van Bergen
America's Parallel Legal Systems

George Corsetti
This Land is Their Land: Condemnation for Corporations

Mark Chmiel / Andrew Wimmer
Let's Open the Gulag: a People's Mission to Gitmo

Kevin Zeese
Counter-Recruitment: How to Keep the Military From Getting their Hands on Your Kids

P. Sainath
Russian Roulette in Vidharbha

John Stauber
How to Bury a Mad Cow

Scott Handleman
Gay in the Third World

Tom Barry
The Politics & Ideologies of the Anti-Immigrationists

John Walsh
Looking for Peace in All the Wrong Places

Justin E.H. Smith
The Hairless Apes of Kansas vs. the Reality-Based Community: Why Progressives Have a Stake in the War on Evolution

Alan Wallis
The Story of Pinky: the Drug Trade in My Neighborhood

Ben Tripp
Negative Space: an Artful Lesson

Frederick B. Hudson
Songs to Lose Your Loneliness By: the Raised Voices of Sweet Honey in the Rock

Poets' Basement
Gaffney, Engel, Davies, and Albert

 

June 24, 2005

Ray McGovern
The Downing St. Fixation: Fixing to Fix "Fixed"

Jorge Mariscal
"They Only Call Us Americans When They Need Us for War": the Paradox of Mexican Americans in Iraq

Desiree Hellegers
Portland vs. the FBI

Zeynep Toufe
What Do the American People Know and When Did They Know It?

Joshua Frank
Call Him Senator Con Job

David Lindorff
Which Flag Would Jesus Burn?

Michael Neumann
Victory and Recruitment

Website of the Day
Gagging Dr. Dean

 

June 23, 2005

Christopher Brauchli
Thomas Griffith and Rule 49: He Practiced Law Without a License; Now He's a Federal Appeals Court Judge

Clay Conrad
Killing Off the Jury with Tort Reform

Standard Schaefer
A Retort to Military Neo-Liberalism

P. Sainath
Vidharbha: No rains and 116F, But It Does Have "Snow" and Water Parks

Mark Engler
CAFTA Deserves a Quiet Death

Norman Solomon
Voluntary Amnesia in America

Cockburn / St. Clair
Frank Calzon

Kathy Kelly
Where You Stand Determines What You See

 

 

June 22, 2005

Kevin Zeese
The Bush Administration's Psy-Ops on the American Public: an Interview with Col. Sam Gardiner

William S. Lind
Afghanistan: the Other War

Arsalan Iftikhar
Patriots Against the PATRIOT Act

Dan Nagengast
Give Populism a Chance: From France to Kansas

David Krieger
To the Graduates: We Live in an Interdependent World

Kathleen & Bill Christison
Tempest in Santa Fe: Confronting Israeli Myth-making

 

 

June 21, 2005

Brian Cloughley
Destroy the Unbelievers!

Mike Whitney
President Disconnect

Dave Lindorff
Who Needs Big Bird, Anyway?

Mark Weisbrot
Bush's Lonely Campaign Against Hugo Chavez

Matthew R. Simmons
The Coming Saudi Oil Crisis

Dave Zirin
The Crass Slipper Fits: Ron Howard's Terrible "Cinderella Man"

Virginia Rodino
The Anti-War Movement and Impeachment

Paul Craig Roberts
A War Waged by Liars and Morons

 

June 20, 2005

Alan Maass
The GM Job Massacre

Tariq Ali
To the Gates of the Gleneagles Hotel!

Mickey Z.
WMDs American-Style: It's 60 Years Since Alamogordo

William Blum
Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends

Gary Leupp
Old News Indeed: In 1999, Bush Craved Chance to Attack Iraq

Jason Leopold
Someone Tell Bush Iraq Wasn't Behind 9/11, Before He Starts Another War

Dave Lindorff
Why the Media Should be Schiavo'd

Alan Maass
The GM Job Massacre

Uri Avnery
Condi and Hamas

Website of the Day
Crimes Against Poetry

 

June 18 / 19, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
Is the Jury Dead?

Greg Moses
Race Bias and the Death Penalty, One More Time

Benjamin Shepard
Arrested for Stickering, Biking and Other Misadventures: Creative Direct Action in the Era of the PATRIOT Act

Stan Goff
Stuff to Do to Stop the War: 95 Days to Pre-Nixonize George W. Bush

Lee Sustar
Does Iraq's Main Labor Union Support the Occupation?

Jude Wanniski
The Tipping Point: Getting Out of Iraq

Diana Barahona
Librarians as Spooks: the Scheme to Infiltrate Cuba Via Libraries

Brian Concannon, Jr.
Justice Dodge in Haiti, Again: Impunity and the Raboteau Massacre

Fred Gardner
How Many Wins Can We Take?

Mike Whitney
Gen. Tommy Friedman's Plan to "Win" the War in Iraq: Reinstate the Draft

Ahmad Faruqui
Star Wars or Earth Wars?

Manuel García, Jr.
De-Eichmannizing America

Roger Howard
Leave Iranian Politics to Iranians

Ron Jacobs
Eros and the Grateful Dead

Ben Tripp
Situation Desperate: Why Am I Not Pleased?

Poets' Basement
Louise, Albert and Engel

Website of the Weekend
Christ's Entry into Washington

 

 

June 17, 2005

Ricardo Alarcón
Who Helped Posada Enter the US?

Clay Conrad
Medical Marijuana: Is Jury Nullification the Next Step?

Marc Estrin
Open-Ended Closure: the Death Penalty and the Culture of Victimhood

Colin Brown
Firebombing Fallujah: Pentagon Lied About Use of Napalm in Iraq

Christopher Brauchli
Pennies for Africa: Bush's Phony Money

Joshua Frank
Blue State Warriors: How Democrats Derailed the Peace Movement

Norman Solomon
The Killing Street Memo

Mary Rizzo
Who's Afraid of Gilad Atzmon?

Bond / Brutus / Setshedi
How Bono and Trojan Horse NGOs Sabotage the Struggle Against Neoliberalism

 

June 16, 2005

John Walsh
The Iraq War Polls: Dems' Stance Even Less Popular Than Bush's

Dave Lindorff
Work 'Till You Die: the Bush Retirement Plan

Adrian Lomax
Torture in U.S. Prisons: Common, Lethal, Unreported

Tom Crumpacker
The CIA, Posada and the Bombing of Cubana Flight 455

Jeffrey Kolakowski
The Kinsley Paradigm: Downsizing the Downing St. Memo

Julene Bair
Turning Off the Ogallala Spigot: Toward a New Way to Farm on the Great Plains

Michael Dickinson
As We Forgive Our Debtors: the Madness of Money

Francois Houtart / Isabel Parra, et al.
Against Terrorism; In Defense of Humanity: an Appeal

Tom Barry
Meet Bolton's Replacement: Robert "First Strike" Joseph

 

 

June 15, 2005

Stan Goff
An Open Letter to US Troops on Loyalty

Daniel Wolff
The Palace at 4 A.M.

Tim Wise
Discover the Nutwork: David Horowitz and the Politics of Ad Hominem Distortion

Ricardo Alarcón
The New CIA Revelations About Posada

Joshua Frank
House Republicans vs. Bush: "This is Not a Conservative War"

John Hilary
Bloodsuckers' Summit: Why the Left Should Rendezvous at the G8

Norman Solomon
Iran's Reformers: a Threat to Theocrats and Neocons

Alexander Cockburn / Jeffrey St. Clair
Juries and Lynch Mobs

Website of the Day
What It Feels Like to be Tasered (Turn Up the Volume)

 

 

June 14, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
Enabling Evil: Bush's Willing Executioners

Forrest Hylton
Stalemate in Bolivia

Richard Gott
The Crisis in Bolivia

Fred Gardner
The Raich Decision: All Power to the Feds

Steve Breyman
Doing the Right Thing is Also Politically Expedient

Dave Zirin
Sacred Hoops: Basketball in the Barrio

Robert Kent
Outsourcing Torture and the Stop-Loss Program

Paul Craig Roberts
Enabling Evil: Bush's Willing Executioners

 

June 13, 2005

Gary Leupp
Another Damning Document

Dave Lindorff
The Inca and Us

John Stauber
Mad Cow USA: the Cover-Up Begins to Unravel

Fred Gardner
Supreme Indignity: Medical Pot Doctors Respond to Justice Stevens

Evelyn J. Pringle
TeenScreen: the Lawsuits Begin

Norman Solomon
Letter From Tehran

Winslow T. Wheeler
Neo-Con Unfurls the Big Picture

 

June 10 / 12, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
Thomas Friedman's Imaginary World

Sharon Smith
Torturers and Liars: Masters of Deception

Brian Cloughley
"Support Our Torturers!"

Chris Kromm
Home Cookin': Pentagon's Base Relignment Plan Would Increase South's Share

Heather Gray
A Day in Mississippi: Some Things Have Changed; Some Remain the Same

Kevin Zeese
What the Left Must Learn from 2004: an Interview with Josh Frank

Mickey Z.
The Pentagon Papers, 34 Years Later

Gary Leupp
A Review of Sison's "At Home in the World"

Eli Stephens
The Asshole in El Paso: Why Posada Carriles Matters

Nick Dearden
A Scottish Band in the Occupied Territories

Oscar Olivera
Recovering Bolivia's Oil and Gas

Robert Fisk
Screening "Kingdom of Heaven" in Beirut

Michael Dickinson
Oh My God!: Gunning for Blasphemers

Poets' Basement
Engel, Albert, Louise, Ford

Website of the Weekend
Gravity's Rainbow, Illustrated

 


June 9, 2005

Len Colodny
Felt Was Asked Under Oath in 1975 If He Was "Deep Throat"

Christopher Brauchli
From Baseballs to Hand Grenades

Ron Jacobs
Light a Candle; Curse the Darkness

Dave Lindorff
US Media Shamed by Brit Journalist

Katrina Yeaw / Alex Schmaus
Repression 101: Anti-War Students Sanctioned at SFSU

Alan Farago
Spin Machine Busts a Gasket in the Everglades: Fed Judge Whacks Jeb

Saul Landau
The Charmed Life of a Mass Murderer

 

June 8, 2005

Jim Hougan
Strange Bedfellows
Deep Throat, Bob Woodward and the CIA

Alan Maass
Is Bolivia on the Edge of Revolution? an Interview with Tom Lewis

Jason Leopold
Enron Lives!: Former Army Sec. White Wants Govt. Money for New Energy Scam

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exit Right, Advani: Unpardonable Acts of Statesmanship

Dave Zirin
The Rotting Soul of the 49ers

Derrick O'Keefe
Bush's Terrorist: the Case of Posada Carriles

Diana Johnstone
Non, Neen, Angelene!
Why Defenders of the "Oui" are Wrong

Website of the Day
The Meatrix

 

June 7, 2005

Forrest Hylton
Bolivia's Agony of the Stalement Continues

Greg Moses / Susan van Haitsma
Pushing Back the Violence

Lenni Brenner
What Madison Would Think About the Air Force Academy's Offical Fanatics

Col. Dan Smith
Liberation vs. Survival in Iraq

Joshua Frank
Dean at the DNC: the Establishment vs. the Elites

Dave Lindorff
Fair-Weather Allies: US Denies French Fighters Emergency Landing Rights

Margot Veranes / Adrian Navarro
Xenophobia in the Desert: Racist Fever Becomes Law in Arizona

Michael Neumann
Sharing Music: Property Gone Wild

 

June 6, 2005

Stew Albert
Everybody Must Get Busted: Supremes Rule Against the Sick

Paul Craig Roberts
Federal Bureau of Entrapment

Nicole Colson
Inside Walter Reed Hospital

Ali Khan
Friendly Renditions to Muslim Torture Chambers

Jason Leopold
When Will Rumsfeld Be Indicted?

Charles Walker Poff
Rumsfeld, China and Hypocrisy

Ramzy Baroud
My Grandpa's Right of Return

Rep. John Conyers
Did Bush Deliberately Deceive America About Iraq?

Evelyn Pringle
TeenScreen's Top Pusher

Gary Corseri
25 Reasons to Impeach Bush

Website of the Day
Save This 200 Year Old Burr Oak from Bible Thumpers with Chainsaws

 

June 4 / 5, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
France's Magnificent Non!

James Petras
The Centrality of Peasant Movements in Latin America

Robert Fisk
Who Killed Samir?

Patrick Cockburn
My Father, Claud Cockburn, the MI5 Suspect

Rev. William Alberts
When Pride in Power Corrupts: the Story of a Methodist President, His Bishops and an "Incompatible" Lesbian Minister

Saul Landau
40 Interns and a Mule: Will the Dems Ever Take Advantage of the Republicans' Blunders?

Mario Lamo Jimenez
Dante with a Brush: Botero Immortalizes Bush

Dave Lindorff
What is the Media Running From?

Lance Selfa
Why Bush is Getting Away with Murder

Tom Crumpacker
On the Use of State Terrorism: the Posada Precedent

Joshua Frank
How Beltway Dems Sank Dean for America

Fred Gardner
Don't Bogart That Taxable Commodity

Michael Dickinson
Roll Out the Barrel: Blood, Oil and Baku

Roger Martin
We Can See, But Not Far Enough

Reza Fiyouzat
Welcome to the Third World

Ben Tripp
Romance: Advice from a Pro

Graeme Greenback
Pardon Me, While I Piss on this Bible

Poets' Basement
Smith-Ferri, Albert, Engel, Smith

 

 

 

June 3, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
Welcome to a Has-Been Country

Joseph Massad
Witch Hunt at Columbia

Jeff Halper
The Process of Transfer Continues

Tom Barry
The Immigration Debate: Whose Side Are You On?

Bruce K. Gagnon
Bush Seeks Military Control of Space: "It's Our Destiny"

Joshua Frank
Bombing Iran: Facts Don't Matter

Mickey Z.
Deep Throat as Sideshow

Gary Leupp
"Peddling Lies About How They Were Mistreated"

Website of the Day
Tattoo on My Heart: Warriors of Wounded Knee, 1973

 

 

June 2, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
The Slave Traders of the Gitmo Gulag

Forrest Hylton
Bolivia: the Agony of Stalemate

Mike Whitney
Post-Mortem on the 4th Amendment: Warrants without Judges

Brian Cloughley
Anarchy in Afghanistan; Ignorance in America

Mazin Qumsiyeh
A Two-State Solution is No Solution

Russell D. Hoffman
High Tension at San Onofre

Norman Madarasz
"Le Jolie Mois de Mai": the Meaning of the French "Non"

Norman Solomon
War Made Easy: from Vietnam to Iraq

David Price
The Shallowness of Deep Throat

Website of the Day
Fallujah on Film

 

 

June 1, 2005

James Petras
Beyond Hypocrisy: the Deeper Meaning of Posada

Justin Delacour
Framing Venezuela: US Media Bias Against Chavez

Edward Jay Epstein
Was "Deep Throat" a Fictoid?

Omar Barghouti / Lisa Taraki
The AUT Boycott: Freedom vs. "Academic" Freedom

Dave Lindorff
When War Goes Off the Script

Kevin Zeese
Reality Check: Who to Believe on Iraq War and Gitmo?

Jason Leopold
When Presidents Lie

William S. Lind
Wreck It and Run

 

 

May 31, 2005

Sen. Mike Gravel
Thank You, Mark Felt: We Need a New Deep Throat

David Krieger
US Nuclear Hypocrisy

Tad Daley
The Nuclear Me-Too Club

Joshua Frank
Pelosi at AIPAC: Israel Comes First

Richard Gott
Chavez Leads the Way

Norman Solomon
Time to Get Serious About Impeachment

Tom Segev
Our Man in the Territories

Walter Brasch
Killing Americans with Secrecy

Diana Johnstone
The French "Non"

 

 

May 28 / 30, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
There's Their Way or the Galloway

Richard Lichtman
We Wuz Framed! the Consolations of George Lakoff

Sharon Smith
The Road to Abu Ghraib

Paul Craig Roberts
Bush Opts for Civil War in Iraq

Dave Lindorff
Whigged Out: the Dems Have Become Merely a Vestigial Opposition Party

Ramzy Baroud
Muslims Were Desecrated, Not Just Their Holy Book

Brian Cloughley
Why Are Nukes OK for You, But Not for Us?

Fred Gardner
Advice from a Lawyer About Medical Pot

Lee Sustar
Chavez Gets Proactive

Joshua Frank
Isikoff Comes Clean: "Nobody in the US Said a Word, Until the Riots"

Justin E.H. Smith
What About the People? a Report from Romania

Jackie Corr
A Montana History Lesson on Assfulness

Michael Kimaid
Bush as Ahab

Toufic Haddad
Lessons from the Reversal of the AUC Boycott

Justin Taylor
The Fear of Paul Virilio

Amir Butler
Searching for a Saladin

Ben Tripp
Insomnia and Sarcasm

Poets' Basement
Albert, Engel, Davies and Louise

 

May 27, 2005

Gary Leupp
It Really is a Crusade!

Daniel Estulin
Infiltrating Bilderberg 2005

Kevin Zeese
Iraq Withdrawal Vote: If Walter "Freedom Fries" Jones Can See the Light, Why Can't Nancy Pelosi?

Robert Fisk
Mubarak's Goon Squads

Dave Zirin
Why Pat Tillman's Parents Are No Longer Silent

Website of the Day
Stuckists

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Dardagan, Slobodo and Williams
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Independence Day Weekend Edition
July 2 / 4, 2005

CounterPunch Diary

"Bomb Teheran!" Urges Jilted Condi?

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

An Iranian MP said Thursday that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice holds a grudge against Iran "because until today she hasn't gotten over her Iranian boyfriend dumping her when she was a university student." The MP, Shakrallah Atar, claimed the faithless lad was from Kazwin , some eighty miles west of Teherean. Atar said his source was a female MP whose name he would not disclose.

Reporting this story the London-based Al Quds Al Arabi commented that "This is not the first time that Iranians used romantic reasons for diplomatic stands. Last year, the newspaper said, rumors spread that the German foreign minister Youshka Fisher's tone had tightened against Iran because he was having an affair with an Iranian young girl who was against the Iranian regime. Other rumors, the newspaper said, indicated that the head of the IAEA, Mohammed Al Baradia's soft stance with regards to the Iranian nuclear file was because he had an Iranian wife."

So just add the claim to the bulging Condee file, already ripe with allegations ranging from intimacy with the Commander in Chief to her Sapphic preference.

 

"Honey, Save Roe v Wade!"
Is This Really Laura Bush's Pillow Talk?

This Friday, in the piece by your CounterPunch editors about the impending resignations of O'Connor and Rehnquist, we noted the pro-choice stance of
Laura Bush as a possible factor in the battle for what is optimistically described as the President's "mind".

Jack McCarthy, Talahassie's answer to Dean Swift, immediately asked what evidence we had for such a claim about the First Lady, about whose hold on Cockburn he jestingly animadverted. Cockburn responded that Laura had evinced support for women's right to chose back in the dawn of the Bush presidency, drawing harsh rebukes from the ultra-Christians for her frankness.

Jack obviously didn't believe a word of this and did some research of his own and then gallantly agreed that I'd got the "basic facts" right. In fact it was during the presidential campaign of 2000 that Laura indicated her support for Roe v Wade. Then, in interviews with NBC and CNN in January, 2001, she said forthrightly Roe v Wade shouldn't be overturned. In 2004, a reporter asked Laura whether she'd changed her view on abortion. She answered, "Yes, I think abortion should be rare." Mrs Bush also told Times reporter Bill Sammon that she agreed with President Bush that human life begins at conception.

 

Race-Baiting at the Neshoba County Fair

In her very fine piece that ran on June 10-11 about Mississippi and its dark history, Heather Gray recalled how Ronald Reagan launched his campaign for the presidency in 1979 with a speech at the Neshoba county fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, not far from where the three civil rights workers, Goodman, cheney and Schwerner, were murdered by the Klan. The speech signaled a fierce amping up of Nixon's "southern strategy", with coded appeals to racis, under the banner of states' rights. Many saw this as pivotal to Reagan's victory.

What Heather wrote about Reagan and the Neshoba Fair is true. But I reminded her that in 1988 the Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis copied Reagan, and went to the Neshoba County Fair right after the Democratic convention in Atlanta where Jackson had made a great and generous speech about the rainbow, and how the party "needed two wings to fly".

Dukakis' decision to go to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in early August was a savage rebuff to Jackson and black hopes. And Dukakis' cowardice and opportunism didn't stop there. In his speech at the Fair Dukakis never mentioned the three civil rights workers who had been murdered nearby. The irony is that Dukakis then got hit with the whole Willie Horton bucket of sewage by Bush's campaign manager Lee Atwater. (And where did Atwater get the Horton case from? From Al Gore, who's used it against Dukakis in the primaries.)

Apropos racist appeals, Already in '76 Jimmy Carter was using the phrase "ethnic purity" to describe white neighborhoods and schools and tossing out phrases about "alien groups" and "black intrusion".To quote one historian, "Interjecting into [a community] a member of another race" or "a diametrically opposite kind of family" or a "different kind of person" threatened what Carter called the admirable value of "ethnic purity")

On Heather's larger theme of racism in Mississippi, I was in New Orleans at the Jazz Fest this spring and Randy Newman sang his song Rednecks, which ends,

Now your northern nigger's a negro
You see he's got his dignity
Down here we're too ignorant to realize
That the north has set the nigger free

Yes he's free to be put in a cage
In harlem in new york city
And he's free to be put in a cage in the south-side of chicago
And the west-side
And he's free to be put in a cage in hough in cleveland
And he's free to be put in a cage in east st. louis
And he's free to be put in a cage in fillmore in san francisco
And he's free to be put in a cage in roxbury in boston
They're gatherin' 'em up from miles around
Keepin' the niggers down.

The laughs from the crowd in front of the Sprint stage at Jazzfest were somewhat nervous.

Heather Gray's piece elicited more than one striking response, including g this dignified communiqué from the office of the Attorney General of Texas.

From: Richard Escamilla
Sent: Jun 10, 2005 12:35 PM
To: hmcgray@earthlink.net
Subject: counterpunch article

to paraphrase the Saturday Night Live skit......Heather, you ignorant slut. Is this all you can write about is events of 3 to 5 decades ago and insinuate that nothing has changed? You are the one that refuses to acknowledge the change that has occurred and you are the one who agitates for ignorance. Spare me your freakin leftist sensibilities and hate-speech. You make me want to puke....


Richard L Escamilla
Office of the Attorney General
Richard.Escamilla@cs.oag.state.tx.us
Phone: 512-460-6419
Fax: 512-460-6800
Pager: 512-235-5023

 

The Tedium Twins

My old parody of PBS's Jim Lehrer and his erstwhile tedium twin, Robin McNeil, met with approval from many CounterPunchers.

From: Morton Skorodin @asis.com
Subject: right wing pbs

Mr. Cockburn,

Great piece on PBS. C-SPAN is almost the same. Claim to be neutral; Brian Lamb is an ICONOBLAST (the opposite of iconoclast) - it's very well-managed. He snickered at a caller who was a Hawaiian "nationalist." Right wing think tanks dominate on CSPAN- e.g. Heritage Found, AEI. They quote the Wash. Times daily. One caller counted 40 Republicans to 21 Democrats. Progressives tolerated rarely - Howard Zinn was on recently. In all fairness CSPAN 2 has some progressive coverage.

Also, Lamb's book - it's chronological - and it completely skips the 60's.

Lamb hung up on me twice; I accused the pres. of treason.

And this from Tom Bernhardt,

I enjoyed your article and parody of the Newshour. I frankly haven't watched it for years for the reasons you demonstrate. However, I believe your parodies give them too much credit. For example, in the case of the cannibalism debate, the two "sides" would have been really represented by a human flesh association spokesman who would be arguing for only some increased regulation compensated for by increased subsidies and a lobbyist from the beef industry decrying how cannibalism was taking away ranch jobs. To put it all into perspective and give balance, the deputy head of the FDA would provide inconclusive reports on the relative nutritional value of beef and human flesh.

Tom

Those Controversial Google Ads: Some CounterPunchers Scoff at "Negative Purists"

Several CounterPunchers rallied eloquently to the support of CounterPunch editors battered by prissy rebukes for trying to make ends meet by running the ads you now find discreetly perched at the end of each web page article.

Dear Alex,

Far be it from me to complain about the Google ads, even if clicking this evening brought me to a chortle-worthy Christianity Today article attempting to spin the Crusades. I'll gladly support Counterpunch this way and, when fortunes allow, through resuming my subscription.

What I wish to warn you about: the ads aren't visible here using Firefox on OS X. Had you not made gentle mention, I'd never have known about them. This may be due to my having run the Ad Blocker extension in the browser to tame animation-happy web sites, but even disabling that feature didn't turn on your ads. I had to fire up the dread Internet Explorer to effect my clicks; so, word to the wise.

Best, Richard Cretan

Now that's what I call dedication to our welfare!

Here's one more vivid endorsement of our efforts to give the good ship CounterPunch some extra financial ballast (though it has to be said that, thus far, Google ad revenue has been on the meager side.

Dear CounterPunch,

Even convicted villains can sometime tell the truth. The pompous, disgraced British 'writer' Jeffrey Archer once did just that. "The freedom of time is the greatest luxury," he wrote somewhere. Those of us who have that freedom should rejoice that we have so painless a method of swelling CounterPunch coffers. For instance, I'd like to have Tony Blair's nose surgically attached to Dubya's anus, but I am happy to click on the Thank Tony Blair link. And, some of the Google links are unexpected sources of interesting items, perhaps bringing
up things that are genuinely unknown to the surfer. One of the links, to yet another 'conspiracy' site, was such a pleasure because spelling, grammar, and composition was so clean and
well-formulated. And, it added to my understanding of how the swine are taking-over the entire world.

So, well done CounterPunch. Don't let the negative 'purists' bring you down or deter you from doing whatever you must to stay alive!