Today's Stories

May 8-10, 2009

Paul Wolf
Obama's Axis of Obedience

Neve Gordon
Jailed for Caring

May 7, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Criminalizing Criticism of Israel

Chris Floyd
A Full-Court Press for Pakistan War

Andy Worthington
Mixed Messages on Torture

Alan Farago
No Place Like Home: a Stress Test for Land Use, Not Just Banks

Ray McGovern
Deux ex Machina on Torture?

Dave Lindorff
Stain Removal: Impeaching the Torture Judge

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
Why is There Rampant Famine in the 21st Century?

Ana M. Malinow, MD
Why We Need a Single-Payer Health Care System

Jeff Armstrong
Freeing Leonard Peltier: What Would Warren Harding Do?

Norman Solomon
A Green New Deal

Website of the Day
The End of Lake Mead?

May 6, 2009

Doug Peacock
The Fate of the Yellowstone Grizzly

Patrick Cockburn
Afghans to Obama: Get Out, Take Karzai With You

Richard Neville
The Torturer's Apprentice

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Power a Nation: Nuclear Bombs or Sunshine?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Of Pork and Baloney: Obama's Defense Budget

Deepak Tripathi
Pakistan in Crisis

Stephen Soldz
A "Natural Reaction": APA Ethics Policy-Maker Endorses Torture

Reuven Kaminer
Nice is Not Enough: Obama vs. Netanyahu and Lieberman

David Macaray
The Chrysler-UAW Deal

Kevin Zeese
Why We Were Arrested at the Senate Finance Committee Hearings

Marjorie Cohn
Stanford Antiwar Alums Call for War Crimes Investigation of Condoleezza Rice

Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
Investigate Psychologist and Health Provider Complicity in Torture

Website of the Day
Who's Behind the Financial Meltdown?

May 5, 2009

William Blum
Torture and Mr. Obama

Uri Avnery
Netanyahu's Plan

Steven Higgs
Autism and Toxic Pollution

Dean Baker
Why Economists Should Learn Arithmetic

Daniel Wolff
The Education of Rachel Carson

Sibel Edmonds
The Broken Congress

Carole King Klein
A New Chance to Save the Northern Rockies

Fidel Castro
Giving One's All

Belén Fernández
Oil and Aguardiente in the Ecuadoran Elections

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Big Lie About Fish vs. Jobs

Website of the Day
"I Married Isis on the Fifth Day of May"

May 4, 2009

James G. Abourezk
The AIPAC Spy Case

Jeff Leys
Obama's War Budget

Patrick Cockburn
Afghan Ayatollahs Press Marital Rape Law

Andy Worthington
A Start on Guantánamo, But Not Enough

Jaime Avilés
Mexico's Plague-Bringers

David Swanson
An Even Worse Bybee Memo

Paul Craig Roberts
Working with Jack Kemp

P. Sainath
Celeb Crusades and the Death of Politics

Eugenia Tsao
Canada's Obama and the Cult of the Prof

Benjamin Dangl
Protest and Rubber Bullets in Paraquay

Sami Al-Arian
Mourning William Moffitt

Website of the Day
"Soldiers Are Cutting Us Down": Kent State, May 4, 1970

May 1 - 3, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Game-Changers: Specter Jumps, Souter Quits

Gary Leupp
Dropping the AIPAC Spying Case

Peter Linebaugh
The Key to the Bastille

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank:
Half Life of a Toxic War: Iraq's Wrecked Environment

C. G. Estabrook
Minion of the Long War

Patrick Cockburn
Kabul's New Elite

Mike Whitney
Economy on the Ropes

Pierre Sprey /
Winslow Wheeler
What "Sweeping Overhaul" of the Pentagon?

Andy Worthington
Al-Marri's Plea Deal: Dictatorial Powers Unchallenged

Mairead Maguire
Stand Up to Israeli Apartheid: a Letter to Obama From a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

Nadia Hijab
The Israel Boycott is Biting

Diane Farsetta
Life, Death and Water Policy

Michael Calderón-Zaks
The Déjà Vu Flu: Why Much of the Discussion About Swine Flu is Racist

Richard Rhames
When Piggies Come Home to Roost: Swine Flu and the Industrial Meat Gulags

Russell Mokhiber
Inside the Beltway Baucus

Ramzy Baroud
Clinton's Unpromising Start

Rannie Amiri
Understanding Lebanon's June Elections

Deb Reich
No Talking, Dammit!

Steven Higgs
Indiana Criminalizes Dissent: Roadblocks on the NAFTA Highway

Brian Cloughley
Malice in Blunderland

David Michael Green
The Party's Over

Farzana Versey
Sex, Swat and Susan Boyle

Jim Goodman
Think Before You Eat: Agriculture and the Environment

Carl Finamore
New Prescription for a Healthy Union Movement

Christopher Brauchli
The Sounds of Silence: the Texas Option

Susie Day
The Real Cause of Unemployment: Employees!

David Yearsley
Nuts Over Beethoven

Lorenzo Wolff
Three Minutes of Perfection

Peter Stone Brown
Dancing with Dylan

Poets' Basement Dominguez, Orloski and Springate

Website of the Weekend
May Day Europe

April 30, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Obama and "Two States": Seamless Continuity From Bush Time

Dana L. Cloud
The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built

Paul W. Lovinger /
Jeannette Hassberg
A Nation of Laws

Binoy Kampmark
Swine at the Trough: the Business of Pandemics

Brian Downing
The Perils of Modernization in Afghanistan

Frank Snepp
Tortured by the Past

David Swanson
The Wrong Torture Question

Conn Hallinan
The Coming Asian Storm

Ron Jacobs
Not Dead Yet: an Interview with Jerry Gordon on the State of the Antiwar Movement

John Goekler
The Only Path to a Middle East Picnic?

Jasmine L. Tyler /
Anthony Papa
An End to Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity?

Website of the Day
Emergency Petition: Stop Coal Industry Intimidation of Activists

April 29, 2009

Joann Wypijewski
Death at Work in America

Patrick Cockburn
The Taliban's Roads to Kabul

Andy Worthington
Cheney's Twisted World

Chris Floyd
The Specter Diversion

Dave Lindorff
No More Excuses: a Specter is Haunting the Democrats

Jeremy Scahill
The Nuremberg Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Doug Henwood
Zionist Lobby Targets Another Tenured Professor: an Interview with William Robinson

Michael Hudson
Will Iceland be Handed Over to a New Gang of Kleptocrats?

Russell Mokhiber
My Ron Pollack Problem--And Yours

Eric Toussaint
Ecuador at the Crossroads

Website of the Day
An Interview with Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on "American Casino"

April 28, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Little Red Light: On Israeli Fascism

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Iraq: the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dean Baker
The Perfect Gift for Wall Street: a Financial Transactions Tax

Michael D. Yates
At the Factory Gate

Conn Hallinan
Georgian Plots? Saakavili's "Order No. 2"

John Stauber
Beyond MoveOn

Tom Barry
The Failed Border Security Initiative

Harvey Wasserman
Who Pays for America's Chernobyl Roulette?

Jeff Nygaard
Pirates, Profits and Propaganda

Frederico Fuentes
Why the U.S. Still Hates Cuba

Website of the Day
The Man Behind the Hood

April 27, 2009

Pam Martens
The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

Patrick Cockburn
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11

Andrew J. Bacevich Guardian of the Status Quo: Obama's Sins of Omission

Mitu Sengupta
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka

Franklin Lamb
Hillary Does Beirut: The 165-Minute Swoop-In

Firmin DeBrabander
Crimes of Economic Madness

Dave Lindorff
Wide Open to Pandemic?

Russell Mokhiber
How Corrupt is That?

Mike Whitney
Pinter's Message to Obama

Mark Weisbrot
Overhauling the IMF

Rev. José M. Tirado
Iceland's New Dawn: How the Right Got Trounced

Website of the Day
American Casino

April 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Andy Worthington
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Jeremy Scahill
Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

Chris Floyd
Top of the Heap: the Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

Mike Whitney
A Housing Crash Update

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama and the Housing Crisis

Chris Kromm
Democratic Lobbyists Key to Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act

Saul Landau
Seventeen Months in "the Hole:" an Interview with the Leader of the Cuban Five

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh

Greg Moses
The Debt Looters

Joshua Frank
Calling for a Coal Moratorium: an Interview with Ted Nace

Fred Gardner
Collective Farming and the Lynch Case

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homework, Testing and Stealth Apartheid in Education

David Michael Green
Of Tea Parties and Teleprompters

Ramzy Baroud
Middle East Spies: a New Front in Gaza's Conflict

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak's Expanding Enemies List

Laura Carlsen
Mr. President, Calderon is Not Mexico

Richard Morse
The Haitian People Need a Lobbyist

Nikolas Kozloff
Protecting the Bald Eagle: a Task Now Falling to ... Hugo Chavez?

Kent Peterson
The Fight to Save Mexico's Mangroves

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scammers Rent a General

Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Financial Experts

Ron Jacobs
Torture is More Than Just "Harsh Tactics"

Richard Rhames
Roman Legends, Book Burning and History's Hunt

Stephen Martin
Wherefore Art Thou American Dream?

David Yearsley
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Michener and Nostalgia's Clammy Embrace

Poets' Basement
Khalil and Mankh

Website of the Weekend
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies and Edward Abbey

April 23, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

Michael Ratner
The Torture Commission Trap

Alan Farago
The Quicksand Economy

Rob Larson
Business Gets Carded

Nadia Hijab
The Real Heroes of Durban

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Deconstructing the Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Helen Redmond
Selling Out Single-Payer: the "Public Option" Con

Adam Federman
The Battle Over New York's Marcellus Shale

Website of the Day
An Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

April 22, 2009

Chris Floyd
The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

Joanne Mariner
Torture Evidence and Terror Blacklists

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Afghan Plan: Fracturing the Antiwar Movement

Gareth Porter
U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Dean Baker
The Tyranny of Bad Economics

Peter Morici
Housing Sales and Fixing the Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Eliminating Bad Pentagon Habits

Barucha Calamity Peller
The Battle to Take Back the New School

Harvey Wasserman
Chernobyl Could Happen Here

Aisha Brown /
Dedrick Muhammad
White Privilege in the Americas

Teo Ballvé
Obama's Feel Good Meeting with Colombia's Uribe

Website of the Day
Ahmedinejad's Durban Speech: What He Actually Said

April 21, 2009

Randy Rowland
Lindy Blake's Great Escape

Dave Lindorff
Jay Bybee's Conspiracy to Torture

Fidel Castro
The Secret Summit

George McGovern
Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Greg Moses
The Unemployment Channel

Benjamin Dangl
Argentina Remembers

Sonia Nettnin
Saving Lives in Gaza

Frank Barat
The Death of Bassem: a Shooting at the Wall in Bil'n

Binoy Kampmark
Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk

John V. Walsh
Code Red for Single Payer

David Macaray
SAG Should be Praised, Not Assailed

Website of the Day
Bonus Man: For Executive Assholes Everywhere

April 20, 2009

Mike Whitney
Housing Bust Comes Roaring Back, Worse Than Ever

Andrea Peacock
Histrionics and Legalisms in Missoula

Henry A. Giroux
Ten Years After Columbine: the Tragedy of Youth Deepens

Liaquat Ali Khan
Drone Attacks on Pakistan's Indigenous Tribes

Fred Gardner
Obama's DoJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers

Stephen Soldz
Obama, Blair, Panetta and the Torture Memos: Praising Moral Cowards, Ignoring Real Heroes

Nadia Hijab
Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East

Dave Lindorff
The Meeting in Trinidad

P. Sainath
India's Press Nixes "R" Word

Nelson P Valdés
A Modest (Transition) Proposal to Obama

Mark Engler
American Empire Foreclosed?

Belén Fernández
The FARC Can't Dance

Website of the Day
Dear Mr. Buffett...

Weekend Edition
May 8-10, 2009

Ivory Snow Girl, R.I.P.

DiFi vs. Marilyn Chambers

By WARREN HINCKLE

Marilyn Chambers, who just died at 56, is an icon to generations of San Franciscans. The former Ivory Snow ("99&44/100% Pure") soapbox cover girl starred in San Francisco's the Mitchell Brothers mega-porn hit movie Beyond The Green Door. Hinckle was arrested for walking his dog without a leash after he wrote columns in the Chronicle pillarying the SFPD for sending some 30 cops to drag Ms. Chambers naked from the O'Farrell in 1985 when Dianne Feinstein was Mayor of San Francisco. Editors.

When the Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Street Theater began presenting live acts on multiple stages -- one set was built as a giant shower room -- the Savonarola inside Mayor Diane Feinstein was awakened. As Mayor the convent-bred Feinstein was about as hang-loose as an Easter Island statue. Her mayoralty was firm on primness -- women working in the mayor's office were expected to wear dresses, no pants; formerly as a city Supervisor she had tinkered with ordinances attempting to regulate the commerce of sex in the famous seaport city, even unto suggesting that all the city's sex emporiums be relocated into a single Red Light combat zone in the largely black Bayview District; she was actually taken aback when the residents didn't cozy up to her idea.

If Dianne hadn't fallen into an upwardly mobile career in politics -- she became Mayor when her predecessor as Mayor, George Moscone was assassinated with Harvey Milk at City Hall -- she would have had an excellent future as a disinfector of public telephones.    

Feinstein empowered the vice squad of the SFPD as a sort of screwball comedy Papal Swiss Guard with the sworn duty of putting the Mitchell Brothers out of business. The O'Farrell, which Hunter S. Thompson called "the Carnegie Hall of sex in America," was raided the way the Allies bombed Dresden. Every one of the Mitchell Brothers’ prostitution busts -- there were hundreds in the 70s and 80s -- was thrown out of court, a reality but that did not deter Feinstein's finest from continuing to hit on the O'Farrell with metronomic regularity. Led by vice lieutenant Dennis Martel who paid proud to the flashlight prowess of the SFPD -- he was frequently spied crawling about the O'Farrell's back stairwells carrying a long black flashlight, and once sent 12 officers throughout the premises with flashlights in search of Marilyn Chambers' W-2 form.

Flashlight-carrying cops invaded the darkened Kopenhagen Lounge, which already had a surfeit of flashlights. Customers sat on overstuffed sofas while undressed ladies cavorted about in the altogether carrying red flashlights which they used to illuminate their endearing young charms.

The trials became so frequent that sometimes there were two in one week. The ending was always the same, with dismissal of the "prostitution" charges against the O'Farrell. These repeat legal performances left Feinstein open to the quip that defines insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.    

The proceedings jammed the city's criminal courtrooms and became a real ass-pain to the judges. Many of the dancers occupied their daytime hours by coming to the courtroom in solidarity and just a bit curious to witness why what they had did at night was criminal by day. The judges grew anxious to clear their calendars of these Feinstein-ordered absurdities and to streamline the processing to save judicial downtime wanted the size of the courtroom crowds diminished to curtail the circus atmosphere; some spectators thought the whole thing such a hoot they brought their lunches into the courtroom. Word of this cool-it-out approach apparently did not reach Hunter S. Thompson, the Mitchell Brothers' Night Manager. One day he was passing the corridor outside the closed courtroom door dressed in his usual garb of tee-shirt and Bermudas, hands occupied with two giant tumblers of Wild Turkey on the rocks, when curiosity got the best of him and he charged through the courtroom double doors to deliver a spontaneous speech demanding a motherfucking speedy trial for his friends the Brothers. Artie Mitchell begged him to please stay away from the courthouse.    

The star of the Brothers legal team was prominent New York attorney Michael Kennedy, who cut his attorney-client teeth in San Francisco in the 1970s defending the Brothers. (Kennedy also defended Jim Mitchell in the over-charged Marin County murder trial of Jim Mitchell for the death of his brother Artie in 2001. The DA said it was first-degree murder, when the shooting was the result of an intervention gone tragically awry.) The Mitchell lawyers in the 1980s acquired stiff necks from fighting off copyright VCR infringements of Beyond The Green Door by the mafia, and the never-on-Sundays constant SFPD vice squad sexual assaults on the O'Farrell.    

The puss came to the pimple with the Marilyn Chambers bust in 1985 when she was dragged as naked as Venus exiting from her tub off the O'Farrell stage by a phalanx of police during a valedictory one-woman show; a total of eleven cops escorted her to her dressing room to ascertain that she didn't conceal a weapon in some bodily orifice and more than 30 officers were eventually on the scene when backup was called because her bodyguard had a gun.     

"One of those cops had the nerve to ask me, 'You don't wear any underwear?' ' she said when she was released from the Hall of Justice at 3am.    

Jim Mitchell had rousted me from the sleep of the just and said you better get down here, this is really a scene -- "here" being his white Mercedes 500 SEL. which was parked in an alley across from the Bastille.     Rocky Davidson of Antioch, a cousin of the Brothers and an indispensable man in the O'Farrell operation, was pawing through the Gucci briefcase of the muscleman from Vegas who was Ms. Chambers' bodyguard. "There's nothing in here but cash," he said disappointedly. The cops were holding her bodyguard for lacking a gun permit and Marilyn -- who had already suffered an overlong detention in the lockup because cops and sheriff deputies were lined up to have their own private Polaroid taken with her -- had refused to leave without him.    

"Wait a minute," said Rocky, "I think I found it." He pulled a little blue card out of the briefcase like a plum from a pudding. Leaves of cash fluttered all over the Mercedes backseat. Rocky took the card and went across the alley to Barrish Bail Bonds where the permit, which would give the bodyguard egress from jail, was eagerly awaited.    

Marilyn came out wearing about twenty blue foxes which had been glued together into a full length coat and the bodyguard, one Bobby D'Apice, followed her wearing a designer Italian dark suit and enough gold to start a pawn shop. "They kill her, they have to kill me too," he said, explaining his role. Jim Mitchell was sitting at the wheel of the Mercedes scratching his head underneath his Irish hunting cap. Deep into the historicity of the moment, he sighed, "The Ivory Snow Girl arrested for prostitution in San Francisco in San Francisco. It's awesome."    

Ms. Chambers before taking a career step up to porn movies had been a model and the upper class-white-girl-next-door beautiful innocence of her face had landed her on a gazillion boxes of Ivory Snow ("99&44/100 per cent pure") as the face of purity. When her night job was revealed, Ivory Snow hastened to pull millions of boxes off supermarket shelves and destroy them.    

Yes. The Ivory Snow Girl had indeed been arrested for prostitution in San Francisco; the gravamen of the charge was that she had bounced her boobs, free, against the head of some bald guy in the audience. That charge, after all the fuss, was quietly dismissed in court.    

The Brothers proved civic-minded chaps, always good for a go at the Comstocks of the San Francisco political establishment -- they went to war against legislation to black out the neon nipples in Carol Doda's big topless sign on Broadway. Ms. Feinstein did not get through her Blitz of the O'Farrell without taking incoming. The O'Farrell marquee blazed: "Want A Good Time? Call Dianne" followed by the mayor's unlisted home telephone number. (The Brothers had friends inside PacBell who were favored with free passes to the O'Farrell.) Each time the sign went up she changed her number, and the next day a new sign would go up with the new number. Tit for tat.    

(Excerpted from Warren Hinckle's forthcoming book, Who Killed Hunter S. Thompson? to be published in June by Last Gasp of San Francisco. @ 2009 Warren Hinckle. His e-mail is: editor@argonaut360.com and his website is argonaut360.com)

Afternote from co-editor Cockburn: The late Herb Caen once told me, as I’m sure he did many others, that Senator DiFi’s spouse boasted to him that in her marital intimacies the former mayor and subsequently senior senator from California threw aside the blue-nose inhibitions described above and was a sensual volcano.  AC.

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