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Today's Stories October 11, 2007 Al Giordano Bill Clinton as Ambassador to the World? October 10, 2007 Michael Yates Travels Across Greenspan's America Gary Leupp Spreading Awareness or Smearing a Religion? David Macaray How Wal-Mart Can be Beaten Alan Farago Corruption and the Law of Intended Consequences Tom Clifford Homeless in Their Own Land: Iraq's Deepening Refugee Crisis Col. Douglas MacGregor Washington's War Sunsara Taylor Nooses at Columbia George Wuerthner Behind the Bovine Curtain Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Indigenous Peoples' Day Michael Dickinson Forgetting Lennon's Birthday Website of the Day Paying for War   October 9, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts Blinded by Ideology: Cato, Trade and Outsourcing Andy Worthington Fourth Whistleblower Rocks Guantánamo Alan Farago The Fall of Florida's Largest Land Developer Brian Eno Exporting Democracy with Missiles David Rovics The RIAA vs. the World Farzana Versey Two Lovers and the Funeral of Secularism Andrew Buncombe and Omar Waraich Musharraf's Landslide Website of the Day Romney and the Wheelchair Bound Medical Marijuana Patient   October 8, 2007 David Macaray Lesbians for Hillary? or Teamsters for Hillary? Jeff Ballinger Nike, Steroids and Marion Jones Brian Eno This Ban Won't Stop Us Christopher Brauchli Translating Bush Louay Safi End the Disgrace of Guantánamo Matt Reichel Homocide by Cops at the Phoenix Airport Dave Lindorff Finally, A Good Day for the Constitution Thomas P. Healy The Politics of Mercury Pollution Martha Rosenberg E. Coli Spreading Slaughter Allowed to Stay Open Richard Rhames A Democrat's Lament Website of the Day Not All Italians Love Columbus   October 6 / 7, 2007 Alexander Cockburn A Rainbow Over a Graveyard Norman Finkelstein Jeffrey Goldberg's Prison James Bovard Are Presidents Entitled to Kill Foreigners? Patrick Cockburn The Invasion of Afghanistan, Six Years Later Jeffrey St. Clair At Disaster Falls Ralph Nader Where Are the Lawyers of America? Ray McGovern So Who's Afraid of the Israel Lobby? Saul Landau A River Runs Through It Ben Tripp Bring on the Next War! Terry Lodge The Grateful Dead Body Parts Delivered to Your Door Reform Act Seth Sandronsky Market Mystification and the Liberal Virus Kevin Funk / Steve Fake Divestment and Darfur Missy Beattie In the Custody of Bush and Cheney Website of the Weekend Snoop Dogg vs. Bill O'Reilly   October 5, 2007 Andy Worthington The Anonymous Victims of Guantánamo David Macaray De-Skilling America's Labor Force Lee Sustar The Democrats and Iran: Can They Sink Any Lower? Dan La Botz Cincinnati Six Years After the Killings and the Riots Aaron Hess Hate Week Comes to Campus William A. Cook Unmasking AIPAC Website of the Day Range of Memory   October 4, 2007 Uri Avnery The Power of the Israel Lobby Dave Marsh Dick Cheney, a Eulogy Valerio Volpi How Italy Became a Launching Pad for the US Military Cecilie Surasky Dissenting at Your Own Risk Dave Lindorff Remaking Iraq, as Vietnam Norman Solomon Sputnik, 50 Years Later Laura Carlsen Costa Rica and CAFTA: Memo Reveals Manipulation Scheme Walter Brasch When Compassion Fails: Bush and the Children's Health Act Ben Terrall Haitian Human Rights Advocate Kidnapped William S. Lind Beyond the OODA Loop Website of the Day Musicians in Handcuffs   October 3, 2007 Vijay Prashad Gang of Four Anita Sinha Black Ties and Bulldozers in New Orleans Winslow T. Wheeler Posturing at the Petraeus Hearings: Where was the Oversight? Sharon Smith The Kucinich Quandary Jeff Leys Our Bonhoeffer Moment Sen. Russ Feingold We Must End This Tragedy Mohamad Bazzi Playing Into the Hands of Ahmadinejad Brenda Norrell A Cry from the Top of the World Robert Weissman No Sex, Still a Scandal at the IMF Website of the Day Jena by Mellencamp   October 2, 2007 Ibrahim Warde Logical Lies About Bin Laden's Wealth Gary Leupp "I Hate All Iranians": Frank Talk from a Defense Dept. Official David Macaray The Hunt for a Blue November: In Pursuit of the Labor Vote Conn Hallinan Religion and Foreign Policy John Ross The Great American Chess Match Alan Farago Ripping Off Miami's Poor Sonja Karkar The Right to Exist: States or People? Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Meteor and the Mahatma Website of the Day Grandin on Che's Legacy   October 1, 2007 Al Giordano The Clinton Campaign's Reckless Race for Big Money Donors Paul Craig Roberts From Burma to Iraq: Hypocrisy Rules the West Moshe Adler The Crimes of Microsoft Ingmar Lee My Kayak Journey Down the Wild Pacific Coast John V. Walsh Ahmadinejad is Not My Enemy Norman Solomon Political Science and Truth of Consequences Roger Burbach Historic Victory in Ecuador for the Left Ramzy Baroud The Politics of Assassination Stephen Lendman The Maestro of Misery: Greenspan's Dark Legacy Susie Day Honey, I Shrank the Military! Website of the Day Letters from Fort Lewis Brig   September 29 / 30, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Clinton Time: Do We Set Our Clocks Forward or Back? Uri Avnery So What About Iran? Andrew Cockburn Iraq's WMD Myth: Why Clinton is Culpable Jeffrey St. Clair Through the Gates of Lodore Wajahat Ali The Good, the Bad and the Iraqi Andy Worthington The Curse of the Military Commissions Don Santina Ethnic Cleansing in San Francisco Ralph Nader Free Lunches, for Corporations! Fred Gardner The Man Behind the MoveOn Ad Seth Sandronsky The US Economy Since 1980 Gideon Levy The Children of 5767 William S. Lind A Ticking Bomb Reza Fiyouzat An Anti-Imperialist Case Against a Nuclear Iran Richard Rhames Wag the Tail, Frag the Dog David Michael Green Buyer's Remorse: Their Purchase, Our Regret Zach Mason Hate and Hope in Herndon Poets' Basement Gibbons, Ali, Davies and Suss Website of the Weekend Domestic Crusaders     September 28, 2007 Kathleen and Bill Christison The Teflon Alliance with Israel Roberto J. González / David H. Price When Anthropologists Become Counter-Insurgents Saul Landau September, the Cruelest Month in Chile Tom Clifford Burma by the Numbers Christopher Brauchli Of Toxic Almonds and Bad Beef Martha Rosenberg Spinning Suicide Statistics Dave Zirin Soldier in Winter: John Carlos Speaks Out on the Jena 6 Laray Polk Bush Library or Lockbox? Binoy Kampmark When Reagan Turned Brown James McEnteer Hell, Columbia: an Academic Hotshot Introduces a Petty Tyrant Website of the Day Concerned Anthropologists   September 27, 2007 Alan Farago Housing Market Crashes and Burns Andy Worthington A Bad Week at Guantánamo Jonathan Cook Why Did Israel Attack Syria? William Hughes Billy Graham, a Prince of War Exposed Ray McGovern Bush, Oil and Moral Bankruptcy Ron Jacobs Joe Biden's Plan to Chop Up Iraq Dave Lindorff Quit the Party! Join the Mass Resignation Movement! Joshua Frank Pruning the Green Party Anne Dachel The CDC, Vaccines and Autism Website of the Day The God-O-Meter   September 26, 2007 Bill Quigley HUD's Home Wreckers Paul Craig Roberts A Pandemic of Police Brutality Jeff Kisseloff Still Smearing Alger Hiss China Hand Is China the True Target of Financial Sanctions Against Iran? Behzad Yaghmaian At the Gates of Paradise Sonja Karkar The Quality of Mercy in Gaza Mike Ferner Interrupting the Empire, 30 Seconds at a Time Col. Dan Smith Freedom to Speak, Freedom to Learn Clifton Ross Bollinger's Barbarous and Ignorant Speech Brenda Norrell A Meeting of Indigenous Peoples in Caracas Website of the Day The Smearing of Jean Maria Arrigo, a Psychologist Opposed to Torture   September 25, 2007 Nicole Colson On the March Against Racism Uri Avnery Foam on the Water Brendan Cooney Ahmadinejad on Broadway: Free Speech? Arrest Him! Harry Browne Bruce Springsteen Comes Home ... to Hell Marjorie Cohn The Drift Toward War with Iran David Macaray The UAW-GM Strike: the Long Knives are Already Out Ralph Nader Hypocrisy and Inverted Priorities in Congress Dan Bacher Schwarzenegger, the Climate Change Hypocrite Anthony Papa Perverted Justice & America's Drug Laws Christopher Ketcham All Politicos Now Classed as Sexual Deviants Website of the Day John Waters on Free Speech   September 24, 2007 George Ciccariello-Maher Racist Violence from Jena to Oakland Saree Makdisi The War on Gaza's Children David Keen Action-as-Propaganda: Learning About the Iraq War from Hannah Arendt Sherwood Ross Just How Powerful is the Israel Lobby? Only Cheney Knows for Sure Ron Jacobs Greenspan's Open Secret Donna Saggia The Cult of the Military and the Decline of Democratic Values Mike Ferner Free Speech Takes a Capitol Beating Malini Johar Schueller Norman Hsu is a Model Minority Monique Dols and Dylan Stillwood Ahmadinejad and Columbia Website of the Day The Promotion September 22 / 23, 2007 Alexander Cockburn On Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" Jennifer Loewenstein Beneath the Hideous Veneer of Security Linn Washington, Jr. The Injustice in Jena: Prosecutorial Misconduct More Dangerous Than Racism Jeffrey St. Clair Going Down in Dinosaur: Oil, Dams and Whitewater (Part One) Alan Farago Genuflecting to China Brian Cloughley Of Hate, Hubris and Atrocities Robert Fantina The Deadly Pattern of US Imperialism Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Land Tenure and Resistance in New Mexico Jason Hribal Fear of an Animal Planet David Rosen Slugger Sex: Athletes, Violence and Male Sexuality Mike Whitney The Era of Global Financial Instability John V. Walsh Who Will Lead a Filibuster of the Iraq War Spending Bill? Dave Lindorff Why Aren't We Banning Blackwater Here? David Michael Green Hiding Behind a Camouflage Skirt Fred Gardner Claudia Jensen (Look Back in Anger) Cassandra Jones Support Our Mercenaries Roger van Zwanenberg Pluto Press Under Attack by Israel Lobby Poets' Basement Buknatski, Davies and Ford Website of the Weekend "For the Bible Tells Me So"   September 21, 2007 Karim Makdisi Letter from Lebanon M. Shahid Alam A History of Violence Alan Farago Who Will Buy My House? Joshua Frank The Demise of the Congressional Black Caucus Dave Zirin Notre Dame and the Economy of Sports Kenneth Couesbouc A Short History of Lending and Borrowing Dr. Steffie Woolhandler and Dr. David Himmelstein Mass Health Care Failure Ben Terrall The Streets of San Francisco: Where Impeachment is Taken Seriously--By Everyone But Pelosi Steve Fournier Ex-Dems, Sign Up Here Frederico Fuentes, et al Voices in Defense of Bolivia Website of the Day Sabra and Shatila, Remembered   September 20, 2007 Kathleen Christison Whatever Happened to Palestine? Zoltan Grossman An Endless Occupation? Paul Craig Roberts As the Empire Slips: Greenspan and the Economy of Greed Stan Cox and Wes Jackson Carbon-Free and Still Wrecking the Planet Russell Mokhiber AARP to Kucinich: Drop Dead Charles Modiano Jim Crow's Children: the Jena 6, Shaquanda Cotton and Blog Power Raymond J. Lawrence Bush's Worrisome Use of Religion Brendan Cooney Body-Snatched Nation Website of the Day Mind Control for Breakfast   September 19, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts Why Did Senator John Kerry Stand Idly By? Paul Krassner The Power of Laughter Sgt. Martin Smith The New Private Warriors: Blackwater in Iraq Seth Sandronsky Living in a Dilapidated Market: To Rent or Own? Claud Cockburn Looking back at the Great Crash Victoria Buch Israel's Agenda for Ethnic Cleansing and Transfer Robert Weissman Oil Warriors: From Greenspan to Kissinger Mike Ferner Can We Talk? Dan Bacher Schwarzenegger's $9 Billion Boondoggle for Big Water Website of the Day Housing Cost Calculator   September 18, 2007 Mike Whitney U.S. Banks Brace for Storm Surge as Dollar and Credit System Reel Alan Farago Interviewing Alan Greenspan: How 60 Minutes Blew It John Ross America's Great Wall: Where Will the Workers Go When They Finish It? Ron Jacobs Nooses Hung From Jena, La. to College Park, Md. Alex Doherty Britain's 9/11 "Truth Movement": Who's Responsible? September 17, 2007 Marjorie Cohn Erwin Chemerinsky and the Post-9/11 Attack on Academic Freedom Paul Craig Roberts Conservatism Isn't What It Used to Be Ricardo Alarcón The Return of C. Wright Mills Amid the Dawn of a New Era Marc Levy Fake Vets Chasing Fame Eva Liddell In 1969 We Already Knew What 2007 Would Look Like Website of the Day Propaganda: Your Job in Germany. Directed by Frank Capra, and written by Theodor Geisel Sept. 15-16, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The General Came to Washington Vicente Navarro How the U.S. Schemed Against Spain's Transition from Dictatorship to Democracy Mike Whitney Plummeting Dollar, Credit Crunch Herman Mindshaftgap Has There Ever Been a Surge? If so, Has it a Future? Ellen Cantarow Girls! Music! Palestine! Jordan Flaherty K-Ville: Fox's New Paean to the N.O.P.D. Zachary Hurwitz Julio Cusurichi on Amazonian Development September 14, 2007 Debbie Nathan New York Times reporter was a member of an illegal underage porn site, claims he was only "posing as online predator" Franklin Lamb Sabra-Shatilla, 25 Years Later Patrick Cockburn Greet Bush and Die: The Killing of Abu Risha Farzana Versey The World's Richest Muslim Tycoon Alan Farago This is Florida, Epicenter of the Housing Bust and of Public Corruption Hank Edson Bill's New Book is Giving Me a Headache September 13, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Petraeus Confided Presidential Ambitions to Iraqi Official Scott Vest, former Air Force Captain at Minot The Barksdale Nukes Andy Worthington Guantánamo: "Ghost" Prisoners Speak At Last Michael Baney Mr. Fixit of Quake-Stricken Peru Has Death Squad Past Dr. Susan Block Is U.S. Run by Secret Homintern? September 12, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts American Economy: RIP Stan Goff The Petraeus Report William Blum When Soldiers Mutiny...Only Those Fighting the War Can End It. Manuel Garcia Forgetting 9/11 Debbie Nathan Why One Sex Survey Didn't Make the Big Time               Subscribe Online

October 11, 2007 Ask Latin America, First Bill Clinton as Ambassador to the World? By AL GIORDANO On a recent trip to the island of his Oxford alma mater, Bill Clinton didn't say what color the would-be First Laddie would choose for the White House drapes, but he did tell the BBC what job he'd like Senator Hillary Clinton to give him if she wins the White House: "I'd be of most use to her doing something to try to help restore America's standing in the world and build more allies and get us to work together again." The former president began his jockeying to become Ambassador-to-the-World last month when he introduced his partner at a Labor Day weekend campaign event in New Hampshire. "You want to fix America's position in the world overnight?" he asked, claiming that public opinion polls in Europe and Canada favor Senator Clinton in the US election. "Elect Hillary president." European and Canadian borders, however, mark the far limits of the geographical zone where another Clinton White House might be a welcome sight abroad. The greatest challenges for the United States brand, internationally, come from the rest of the planet and its peoples. In most corners of this earth, the name Clinton is as distrusted as that of Bush. Bill acknowledged to the BBC that "most of the alienation" around the globe stems from the war in Iraq. That his favorite presidential candidate voted to authorize that war in 2002 is only one of the spoonfuls of salt that Clinton, Inc. heaps upon that wound. How soon we forget that terrible day back on December 16, 1998 when President Clinton addressed the nation in a televised speech: "Earlier today, I ordered America's armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq." And that was just five months after US cruise missiles rained down upon an aspirin factory near Khartoum, Sudan: a murderous grandstand move that changed the national subject just three days after the president had the embarrassing duty to testify before a grand jury about his personal problems. Clinton's claim that the Sudanese factory had to be destroyed because it was developing chemical weapons of mass destruction turned out to be as false as George W. Bush's WMD hoax. Chemists waded through the rubble, collected soil samples and found not a trace. Later, the Clinton Justice Department settled out of court with the plant's owners, returning $24 million to them from the US Treasury, to hush up the scandal. Global distrust and resentment toward the United States did not begin with George W. Bush; Clinton, as president, fueled it, too. The true legacy of the first Clinton White House around the world precludes the former president's illusory claim that he can somehow be the magician that would "restore America's standing." While Bill Clinton remains popular inside the United States, and perhaps among white elites in Europe, he would be an albatross, not a talisman, around the neck of future US policy in the Middle East and Africa. But that's not all. His Latin America policies are remembered particularly bitterly in this hemisphere. The Democrats' Neighborhood Bully Unlike former Democratic presidents John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, whose legacies are revered in many parts of Latin America (in peasant shacks throughout the hemisphere it is still common to find a portrait of JFK next to those of saints, saviors and popes on candlelit altars), Clinton's heavy-handed policies toward America's southern neighbors still invoke widespread resentment and distrust down here. The Democrat's success in enacting a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that his Republican predecessor was unable to sell to a Democratic Congress makes Clinton the man singularly most responsible for the destruction of the Mexican family farm, the natural environment and the labor rights of industrial workers in Mexico. The corresponding exodus of tens of millions of its citizens to the United States since NAFTA took effect in 1994 has not been easy on the migrants, their families or on US workers, either. When it came to Mexico and Latin America, President Clinton was the looter-in-chief. He wielded the US-imposed war on drugs and other pressures to destabilize Latin American governments and economies. Once weakened, it was easier to impose "free market" policies (and open the door for corporate America) upon them. In 1996 and 1997 the Clinton administration "decertified" Colombia as drug-war ally (cutting off much US and international aid). Then in 2000 the Clinton-authored US military intervention called Plan Colombia launched a terrible environmental and human bloodbath there that continues to this day. As commander in chief, Clinton exempted the Colombian state from most of the human rights conditions that the US Congress had insisted be part of the multi-billion dollar expenditure. Seven years later, the Colombian military and its related paramilitary squads have assassinated thousands of Colombian union organizers, farm worker leaders and other social fighters, the narco-state is more corrupt, much of the Amazon rainforest has been harmed by Plan Colombia's aerial herbicide assault, and the Colombian Civil War rages on, unabated. Even as Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, and Democratic Congressional leaders now shun the government of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe due to his relentless attacks on human rights, Bill Clinton made Uribe a plenary guest of honor at his recent Clinton Global Initiative gathering in New York. Last June, Clinton accepted an award from the butcher of Bogota. It was Washington's support for Plan Colombia, and the harmful effects it had on neighboring countries, that began the rift between the US and Venezuela, not, contrary to corporate media spin, anything that Hugo Chavez had said or done at the time. The decayed US relations with Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador began not under Bush, but with the Clinton administration. In Latin America, Clinton hitched himself to a generation of hyper-capitalist heads of state, visiting Brazil's Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Argentina's Carlos Menem and Mexico's Ernesto Zedillo in 1997 as each of them pursued neoliberal economic policies. The consequences on their peoples provoked their respective parties' electoral defeats in the succeeding presidential campaigns there. Clinton visited Zedillo again in 1999, this time for an "anti-drug summit" held on the vast hacienda of a banker accused of narco-trafficking and drug money laundering, Roberto Hernandez Ramirez, president and owner of Banamex. I reported the story from that summit, and after a series of follow-up reports found myself defending a libel suit filed in New York by his bank. We emerged victorious in 2001 with a precedent that established, for the first time, First Amendment protections for Internet journalists. But as that case was grinding through the wheels of justice, something very strange and unexpected occurred that shed more light on the Clinton administration policies toward Mexico. The Great Bank Robbery In 1998, Clinton's treasury secretary Robert Rubin authorized a sting operation on drug money laundering Mexican bankers called Operation Casablanca, which led to the indictment of two Banamex executives and motions to seize more than $3 million dollars from the bank. This came at a time when Clinton's state department was rattling sabers with threats to decertify Mexico as it had done in previous years to Colombia. When the Clinton administration came to an end in 2001, Rubin left Treasury to become director of Citigroup in New York, the largest financial services company on earth. After Rubin had, from Washington, lowered the value of Banamex (to much greater impact than any of our litigated news stories could have possibly had), he, from the private sector in New York, engineered Citigroup's purchase of that same Mexican bank in 2001. The former National Bank of Mexico, for a controversially low price of $14 billion dollars (the sale was tax-free on the Mexican end, causing wide outrage here), became the property of Rubin's Citigroup in the United States, and the disgraced Hernandez Ramirez along with another Banamex partner received seats on the board of directors of Citigroup. It's that kind of shenanigans and revolving door influence that Senator Jim Webb (D-Virginia) invoked when campaigning against "Robert Rubin Democrats" to win his seat in 2006. But it cuts much deeper in the memories of the Mexican citizenry and press, which will never, ever, view the extended hand of Bill Clinton as one to be welcomed, much less one that could "restore America's standing." Outside of the Caribbean island nation of Haiti, to where Clinton sent troops to back the democratically elected government Jean-Bertrand Aristide (and to where the Bush administration later sent troops to back a coup d'etat against it), I can't think of a single other populace in Latin America that would like to see Bill Clinton representing the United States in the region again. The oligarch class of Latin American countries would of course be thrilled with a new Clinton administration, this time with Bill in the role he openly seeks as Ambassador-to-the-World, in particular those that took their money and ran to Miami. Given various opportunities to break from previous Clinton administration failures in Latin America, Senator Hillary Clinton had made it clear that, if president, she'll continue down the same harmful path. When last July, rival Democratic Senator Barack Obama said he would be willing to meet with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez in his first year in office without preconditions, candidate Clinton labeled such vision as "irresponsible and frankly naïve." When Obama went to Miami's Little Havana to call for easing the US embargo on Cuba, the Clinton campaign replied that it would not even "talk about" changes in US Cuba policy. What's not clear is whether Bill Clinton's testing-the-water campaign in London last week in favor of his becoming the next administrations roving international diplomat was a calculated message delivery from the Clinton campaign, or whether the polls have simply gone to Bill's head and he picks a peculiar way of lobbying his wife for the job he wants. He has previously stated that he'll do whatever is asked of him by his presidential spouse, should she win the Oval Office, but would otherwise take a hands-off approach. The contrary statement to the BBC was the first suggestion that one or both of the Clintons have that specific foreign policy role in mind for the former president. Candidate Clinton has also spoken aloud on the campaign trail that if elected, prior to her inauguration, she would send "emissaries" across the world to announce to foreigners that, "America is back" (a phrase lifted from Obama's stump speech). But a new Clinton White House is not likely to impress the world in the ways that a black American president, son of an African immigrant, with a "post-boomer" way of speaking and an outside-the-box approach to foreign policy clearly would. "It would be, I think in many ways, a far more powerful thing in the world, to have the first black president of the United States," the South African former archbishop Desmond Tutu told ABC News last month. "You don't know what it would do to people of color in other parts of the world." The Ambassador Bill talk from both Clinton camp intends to compete with Obama's strong point, but it reveals a belief in their own hype that hits the red zone on the hubris scale. In August, Senator Clinton (again, responding to a refreshing foreign policy statement by Obama in which he ruled out first use of nuclear weapons in Afghanistan or Pakistan in the hunt for bin Laden) refused to take the nuclear option off the table, and lectured Obama at an AFL-CIO debate condescendingly that, "You can think big, but remember, you shouldn't always say everything you think if you're running for president, because they could have consequences," she reflected the very kind of American arrogance that gives most of the world no reason at all to trust or want to work with the United States. While Americans feud at home as Democrats vs. Republicans, the previous Clinton and Bush administrations have behaved without distinction toward most of the rest of the world. The suggestion that I'm Bill Clinton, I'm here to help you, and I can "restore America's standing" for you, is laughingstock in other lands, and especially de risa among the United States' closest neighbors in Latin America. We're just not sure, as we listen to such fantasy, if we're laughing or we're crying. Al Giordano, the founder of Narco News, has lived in and reported from Latin America for the past decade. His opinions expressed in this column do not reflect those of Narco News nor of The Fund for Authentic Journalism, which supports his work. Al encourages commentary, critique, additional analysis and news tips for his continued coverage of the US presidential campaign to be sent to his email address: narconews@gmail.com.

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