Dave Lindorff

Back in late 2006, it was widely reported in the Latin American media that President Bush, or perhaps his old man, had bought a 100,000-acre farm in a remote area of Paraguay.

What struck people at the time was the choice of country. Paraguay, of course, has gained a certain Club Med status among the world's villains and criminal elements as the place to go when the law's on your tail. The country, ruled for six decades by the dictatorial and fascist Colorado Party of Gen. Alfredo Stroesser, an almost cartoon caricature of a Latin American dictator, has no extradition treaty with any nation.
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In the last few days, both the Israeli military and the U.S. military have fired missiles into homes, in an effort to target what they said were terrorists, in the process killing many innocent civilians.

But what a contrast we see in both the reporting on these events, and in the response within the two countries!
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Is America at the mercy of an invasion of the pumpheads?

The bizarre behavior of Bill Clinton during this campaign season, which has seen this once smooth-talking and politically uber-sophisticated campaigner repeatedly stick a foot in his mouth and undermine his wife's struggling campaign, raises the issue of whether he is suffering from postperfusion syndrome -- a now recognized cognitive impairment common in patients who have undergone heart bypass surgery.

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I admit to feeling a little like the weatherman who keeps saying it's going to rain, and who eventually is proven correct. I feel certain that the Bush/Cheney regime is going to launch a disastrous attack on Iran, but have made several calls, which have been proved wrong, beginning back in October 2006, when I wrote that it looked like several aircraft carrier battle groups were being put in position for the assault, but then it was called off.

Now it looks like the attack is coming soon.
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Let's at least make one thing clear: Hillary Clinton's claim that she is ahead in the popular vote for the Democratic nomination, based upon her having "won" the renegade "primaries" in Michigan and Florida, is both nonsense and potentially fatally destructive of the Democratic Party campaign.

First the nonsense. In both states, because the local parties decided to hold primaries out of order and much earlier than scheduled by the Democratic National Committee, those votes did not count, and the delegates chosen will not be counted at the August convention.
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Time for a discussion on...not race, but racism.

One of the clear observations that can be made about the ugly Democratic presidential primary just held in Pennsylvania is that it was marred by racism.

The winning candidate, Hillary Clinton, who bested Barack Obama by just over 9 percent of the vote after a six-week campaign, made a determined effort to court the white, working class voters in Pennsylvania's midsection and in the heavily ethnic northeastern part of the state, and she succeeded. According to exit polls, for example, white men voted 57 percent for Clinton and 43 percent for Obama. White women went 68 percent for Clinton and 32 percent for Obama. White Catholics, a particular target of the Clinton campaign, went 70 percent for Clinton and 30 percent for Obama -- her biggest margin of any grouping.

Most of Clinton's white voters came from the overwhelmingly white rural parts of the state and the ethnic northeast and far west. The evidence: Obama won the urban vote by 60 percent to 40 percent.

Clinton began her focus on the white vote in earnest during the South Carolina primary, when husband Bill famously equated Obama's campaign with that of an earlier black presidential campaigner, Jesse Jackson. The linkage was immediately spotted as a clever way of labeling Obama as a "black" candidate, since Jackson has always been a lightning rod for white voters because of his active support for touchy issues such as affirmative action and fair housing laws.

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The corporate media have been quick to buy into and promote the Hillary Clinton campaign claim that she won the Pennsylvania primary by "double digits," but the truth is, that involves a bit of creative rounding.

The final figures for the vote are that Clinton won 1,258,245 votes out of 2,300,542 cast, compared to 1,042,297 for Barack Obama.

If you do the math, that works out to 54.71 percent for Clinton, and 45.31 percent for Obama.

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Tough guy Hillary Clinton, on the morning of a critical primary vote in Pennsylvania, uttered a monstrous threat, saying on ABC's "Good Morning America program that if Iran were to launch a nuclear attack on Israel while she was president, "we would be able to totally obliterate them."

Think about that a moment! A country that we view as a theocracy, run dictatorially by a bunch of self-appointed religious fanatics, whose rule is enforced by an army of equally fanatic quasi-military thugs and enforcers, launches an attack on America's ally Israel, and Clinton says her response would be to incinerate the people of that country -- people who are as powerless to stop such an attack as would be the people of Israel or the United States.

Is this the way we want the world to work? Is this the way we want our government to act?

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Is the Iraq War to blame for America's long-term economic decline and for the current economic crisis?

Martin Neil Baily, a chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton, and now director of the business initiative at the Brookings Institution, in an opinion piece that ran Sunday in The New York Times, says no. Claiming to be opposed to the Iraq War, he nonetheless suggests the nearly $500 billion spent on Iraq to date -- all of it borrowed money -- cannot be blamed for the credit crisis, or for high oil prices.

But Baily is looking at things way too narrowly. First of all, as Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel economist and chief economist at the World Bank, has noted that the real cost of the Iraq War is probably now closer to $3 trillion, in terms of future costs of veterans benefits, replacement of equipment, and payment on the debt that has been piling up because of the government's unwillingness to make the public pay for the war in real time. That whopping bill is in the minds of the international investors who have been deserting the dollar in droves, causing it to approach Third World status as a currency.
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