The Gray Matters

Monday, December 31, 2007

Name Change for Fox News?

Fox News has announced plans to change their name to one more suitable to their real mission.

The candidates are:
1. Pravda
2. Izvestia
3. Bush Tales
4. Goose Step News
5. Fascist Road
6. Biased and Don't Care
7. Lie Brary of Knowledge (from CT)
8. All Anti-Hillary, All the Time
9. Fixed News
10.Dumb, So You Don't Have to Be
11.All the Points of View You Agree with Anyway

:>)

Looking at America

Editorial
The New York Times
Published: December 31, 2007

There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.

It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.

The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.

Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.

We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.

Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.

The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.

Hundreds of men, swept up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. Prisoners are held there with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.

In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.

The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.
These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.

We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.

The Great Divide

December 31, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
The Great Divide
By PAUL KRUGMAN
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/pau
lkrugman/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/opinion/31krugman.html?th=&emc=th&pagewant
ed=print

Yesterday The Times published a highly informative chart laying out the
positions of the presidential candidates on major issues. It was, I'd argue,
a useful reality check for those who believe that the next president can
somehow usher in a new era of bipartisan cooperation.

For what the chart made clear was the extent to which Democrats and
Republicans live in separate moral and intellectual universes.
On one side, the Democrats are all promising to get out of Iraq and offering
strongly progressive policies on taxes, health care and the environment.
That's understandable: the public hates the war, and public opinion seems to
be running in a progressive direction.

What seems harder to understand is what's happening on the other side - the
degree to which almost all the Republicans have chosen to align themselves
closely with the unpopular policies of an unpopular president. And I'm not
just talking about their continuing enthusiasm for the Iraq war. The G.O.P.
candidates are equally supportive of Bush economic policies.

Why would politicians support Bushonomics? After all, the public is very
unhappy with the state of the economy, for good reason. The "Bush boom,"
such as it was, bypassed most Americans - median family income, adjusted for
inflation, has stagnated in the Bush years, and so have the real earnings of
the typical worker. Meanwhile, insecurity has increased, with a declining
fraction of Americans receiving health insurance from their employers.
And things seem likely to get worse as the election approaches. For a few
years, the economy was at least creating jobs at a respectable pace - but as
the housing slump and the associated credit crunch accelerate and spill over
to the rest of the economy, most analysts expect employment to weaken, too.
All in all, it's an economic and political environment in which you'd expect
Republican politicians, as a sheer matter of calculation, to look for ways
to distance themselves from the current administration's economic policies
and record - say, by expressing some concern about rising income gaps and
the fraying social safety net.

In fact, however, except for Mike Huckabee - a peculiar case who'll deserve
more discussion if he stays in contention - the leading Republican
contenders have gone out of their way to assure voters that they will not
deviate an inch from the Bush path. Why? Because the G.O.P. is still
controlled by a conservative movement that does not tolerate deviations from
tax-cutting, free-market, greed-is-good orthodoxy.

To see the extent to which Republican politicians still cower before the
power of movement conservatism, consider the sad case of John McCain.
Mr. McCain's lingering reputation as a maverick straight talker comes
largely from his opposition to the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which he
said at the time were too big and too skewed to the rich. Those objections
would seem to have even more force now, with America facing the costs of an
expensive war - which Mr. McCain fervently supports - and with income
inequality reaching new heights.

But Mr. McCain now says that he supports making the Bush tax cuts permanent.
Not only that: he's become a convert to crude supply-side economics,
claiming that cutting taxes actually increases revenues. That's an assertion
even Bush administration officials concede is false.

Oh, and what about his earlier opposition to tax cuts? Mr. McCain now says
he opposed the Bush tax cuts only because they weren't offset by spending
cuts.

Aside from the logical problem here - if tax cuts increase revenue, why do
they need to be offset? - even a cursory look at what Mr. McCain said at the
time shows that he's trying to rewrite history: he actually attacked the
Bush tax cuts from the left, not the right. But he has clearly decided that
it's better to fib about his record than admit that he wasn't always a
rock-solid economic conservative.

So what does the conversion of Mr. McCain into an avowed believer in voodoo
economics - and the comparable conversions of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani
- tell us? That bitter partisanship and political polarization aren't going
away anytime soon.

There's a fantasy, widely held inside the Beltway, that men and women of
good will from both parties can be brought together to hammer out bipartisan
solutions to the nation's problems.

If such a thing were possible, Mr. McCain, Mr. Romney and Mr. Giuliani - a
self-proclaimed maverick, the former governor of a liberal state and the
former mayor of an equally liberal city - would seem like the kind of men
Democrats could deal with. (O.K., maybe not Mr. Giuliani.) In fact, however,
it's not possible, not given the nature of today's Republican Party, which
has turned men like Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney into hard-line ideologues. On
economics, and on much else, there is no common ground between the parties.