All In?

In his classic, The American Political Tradition, Richard Hofstadter wrote about Herbert Hoover (blamed for the Great Depression of the 1930s): "...He (Hoover) had tried to lead the nation out of the wilderness and back to the comforts and splendors of the old regime. He had given his warnings and they had been spurned. Perhaps, after all, it was the spirit of the people that was not fundamentally sound." Could it be, after all these years, that the spirit of the people still is not fundamentally sound? As Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." If this is a (fair & balanced) jeremiad, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Pools of Riverside County
By Timothy Egan

Riverside, Calif. – Look around at the still-life of half-built neighborhoods and red-tiled roofs, all so new, planted during the Miracle-Gro years when homes became A.T.M.s.

Look closer and you think you’re staring into a ghost exurb – empty homes left to bankers. This is the new America, Southern California’s affordable edge city, drowning in a sea of debt. In the Inland Empire, the eastern-most suburbs of Los Angeles, one out of every 43 households is facing foreclosure proceedings.

Peek behind the palm trees and there you see the most shocking sight: abandoned swimming pools, fetid and green, left to the elements and choked with algae. Thousands of people have walked away without even draining the water. Mosquito control agents now patrol these murky pools, treating them with pesticides to keep disease-carrying larvae from forming.

“With the skyrocketing foreclosure rate, the problem is compounding daily,” said Jared Dever, a spokesman for the government district that monitors insect breeding grounds. He said about 2,000 abandoned swimming pools would have to be treated in just one part of Riverside County.

The new year dawned with banks set to repossess more homes than any time since the Great Depression – about 2 million residences, according to various forecasts.

Is this the image of our consumptive age: the empty swimming pools of Riverside County? The epitome of middle-class life as just another cash play? People who took out loans on houses they never could afford, hoping for a quick flip, have left this squalor under the sun to the mosquito-control agents.

Or maybe we should look just to the west, to Orange County and beyond, to the half-empty glass hulks of the banks that changed the rules of lending – Ameriquest, New Century and Countrywide, now being picked over by federal investigators and civil litigants.

Ameriquest, founded in Orange County, basically invented the subprime mortgage industry, figuring out numerous ways for borderline debtors to defy gravity. Now bankrupt, they settled a lawsuit for $325 million after being accused of predatory lending practices. Their slogan was: “Proud sponsor of the American Dream.”

New Century Financial, also founded in Orange County, flew just as high. It is now bankrupt and defunct.

Countrywide, based outside San Diego, spread like a retail virus until it became the nation’s largest home-loan lender. The company chairman, Angelo R. Mozilo, could end up as the face of the subprime meltdown. Last year, while stock in his bank tanked by 80 percent in value, Mozilo sold shares worth $166 million, according to the bank’s financial reports. For the last two quarters it has reported losses in excess of $1.5 billion.

It’s an old story, not even surprising: corporate leaders say one thing to the public – we’re on a roll! — while dumping stock just as fast as they can in private. For recent history, we only have to go back to Ken Lay and Enron. The surprise is that it keeps happening, with only the corporate names changing.

Earlier this week, Mozilo said he would give up $37.5 million in severance pay. But it’s small change for a man who sold shares worth $310 million during a three-year period when most of the helium was being pumped into the housing balloon.

You may have seen Mozilo with Jim Cramer or Maria Bartiromo on television, touting the great American housing miracle. It was all good, all up, up, up. Flip and roll. No man with without a mortgage. Mozilo said every American who wanted to buy a home should be able to do so, and Countrywide made it nearly as easy to get a mortgage as ordering fries at the takeout window.

I knew something had drastically changed a few years ago when I saw a man with an advertising sandwich board standing at a busy intersection in Los Angeles; the board said, “Re-fi now – guaranteed low rates.” The banker as virtual squeegee man.

Now, you sense a meanness around the abandoned swimming pools of Riverside County. “Perhaps now we’ll see a removal of the low-class types,” wrote one man in a reader post for the North County Times, a Southern California newspaper.

“Too many house-flippers. Maybe they’ll be burger-flipping now,” wrote another.

Riverside County, stretching from Orange County to the Arizona border, is nearly the size of New Jersey. It added more than half million people in the last six years. Four years ago, this was Bush Country, with Republicans winning nearly all of the 100 fastest-growing counties in America, places like Loudoun County, Virginia, or Douglas County, Colorado.

Now, if you want to find some of the highest foreclosure rates in the country, you go the places where exurban America is pushing into farm fields and forests. In 2005 there were 12 home foreclosures in Loudoun County. Last year, more than 600.

Any fix to this mess won’t be easy. President Bush has proposed a plan. Democrats say it doesn’t go far enough. Who will get the blame, the backhand from those new homes filled with new voters?

People who bet their pensions, their savings, their college funds on something that seemed so safe now look at these wrecks on the banking frontier and wonder: what were we thinking?

It’s obvious what we were thinking, all of us – homeowners, appraisers, brokers, buyers, bankers. We were all in on the bet.

[Timothy Egan worked for 18 years as a writer for The New York Times, first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, then as a national enterprise reporter. In 2006, Mr. Egan won the National Book Award for his history of people who lived through the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time. In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America." Mr. Egan is the author of five books, including The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, and Lasso the Wind, Away to the New West. He lives in Seattle.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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Kelso's Farewell To The Dubster

John Kelso is the resident redneck at the Austin Fishwrap. His latest take on the final POTUS's SOTU address will bring the Dumbos out of the woodwork expressing their outrage at his disrespect for the office of the POTUS. As another former POTUS put it, "If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen." If this is a (fair & balanced) Trumanism, so be it.

[x Austin Fishwrap]
Fellow Americans, the truth: Union in a sorry state
By John Kelso

Here's the State of the Union address that President Bush should have delivered Monday night if he had intended to tell you the straight skinny.

"My fellow Americans, the only good news I can think of is that I'll be outta here next year. So party on down, dude. Today in America, there are two famous ducks: me and the Aflac mascot. How can you tell us apart? Easy. I'm the one that's lame. The other good news is that it's been awhile since Dick Cheney shot anyone in the face. Hold your applause until after bird season.

"Other than that, my fellow Americans, we're hosed. OK, so I'm rich, so let me rephrase that. My fellow Americans, YOU'RE hosed.

"Now, you may have noticed that the stock market has been in the toilet. This is because of a subprime mortgage scam that has made global markets from here to Dubai, uh, uneasy. But here's the good news. More Chinese have cars than ever before. Maybe we'll get lucky and some of them will buy a Chevy. So here's my economic stimulus plan: If you know a Chinese guy, send him out to the Chevy dealership.

"Now, some of you are looking forward to those $600 checks the government will be sending out. Of course, $600 won't make a split pea-sized dent in all the money you've lost on your 401(k) because of the subprime mortgage scam. But let me help out with a savings tip: Don't vacation in Europe. Your money's no good there. Literally. There's Monopoly money, then there's the U.S. dollar. In fact, because of all the money you're losing on your 401(k), we're thinking of changing the name to .401(k).

"And remember, when you get that government check, the faster you cash it, the less chance it'll bounce.

"My fellow Americans, if you were banking on your personal savings to retire any time soon, my suggestion would be to get in the sign business. I'd start by making a sign that says, 'Will work for food.' If that doesn't work out, I understand they have some openings for greeters over at Wal-Mart. So if you look good in a blue vest and you can stay on your feet for eight hours, you have a future in marketing.

"Oh, before I get booed out of this joint — and, hey, it could happen — I should mention our new jobs program. We're building a big fence along the U.S.-Mexico border to help protect this country from a ready source of cheap labor. So, if you can pound posts, we should have some openings soon. On the other hand, because we can't hire any Mexican nationals to do the work, it'll go way over budget.

"I'd also like to report progress on the Iraq war. Under my plan, our troops will start leaving in either 3036 or when Mesopotamia freezes over, which ever comes last.

"So good luck, and fill 'er up now, because gas prices haven't peaked at $2.98, if you catch my drift."

[John Kelso's column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Contact him at 512-445-3606 or or jkelso@statesman.com.]

Copyright © 2008 The Austin American-Statesman

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LOL Funny: Jon Stewart's (Currently Unemployed) Writers Review Dub's SOTU Message

What else did The Dubster omit in his farewell SOTU address? Steroids in Major League Baseball? Katrina survivors in LA and MS? WMDs? If this is (fair & balanced) drollery, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
State of The Union: Shocking Omission
By The Topical Satire Initiative

We had been looking forward to President Bush’s State of the Union address for months, knowing that it would once again bring to the fore the most pressing issue of our generation: human-animal hybrids.

On Monday afternoon, whitehouse.gov, our one-stop shopping site for neutral-colored residences, posted this important update on the proceedings:

“President Bush will deliver his State of the Union address on January 28, 2008. Whatever the form, content, delivery method or broadcast medium, the President’s annual address is a backdrop for national unity.”

Our guesses — and please bear in mind that we are neither pundits nor smart people — were:

Form: Macaroni collage
Content: In-depth analysis of monumentally important human-animal hybrid controversy
Delivery Method: Ice Cream Truck
Broadcast Medium: Tin cans, string

Boy, was our collective face red! Turns out, Bush chose to go with:

Form: Speech
Content: Economic stuff, Incentive stuff, Legacy stuff
Delivery Method: Mouth
Broadcast Medium: TV

Truly, the address was a firm, sure-footed and resounding proclamation that even our 43rd president himself was surprised he had to do another of these things.

9:06: The President arrives, fashionably late, and fashionably attired in a blue tie the exact shade of America’s current malaise. After much hand-shaking, he takes his place at the rostrum, in front of Dick Cheney, a human-zombie hybrid, and Nancy Pelosi, a human-woman hybrid.

9:07: Bush gets down to business right away, talking about the economy, his stimulus plan, etc. Obviously, he’s saving human-animal hybrids for later in the speech.

9:12: Tax relief. No mention of how human-animal hybrids could affect it.

9:22: Human-alcohol hybrid Ted Kennedy checks his program, trying to figure out who the guy in the blue tie behind the podium is, and if there’s an intermission.

9:29: “I call on Congress to ban unethical practices such as…” This is it! “…the buying, selling, patenting, or cloning of human life.” Human-animal hybrids, here we —

Um.

Hello?

He’s just moved on to “matters of justice.” Matters of justice!? How about the injustice of not discussing human-animal hybrids?!

9:30: Okay, now we’re ticked.

9:33: America is responding to immigration by “deploying fences.” If we had human-animal hybrids, we could line them up along the Mexican border. They would be dangerous, yet understanding. Does nobody see this?

9:40: Iraq.

9:53: Iran.

9:55: Wiretapping.

10:00: Wow. He’s really not even going to mention them.

10:01: “…And the state of our union will remain strong.” “God bless America.”

Yes, we’re a little shocked right now.

But in a way, we’re almost glad President Bush didn’t discuss human-animal hybrids in this year’s State of the Union. Perhaps he understood that, with only one year left, they’re simply too big for him to take on. (Some are, quite literally. Especially if the human is tall to begin with, and then the animal it’s fused with is like a rhino or a blue whale.)

We look forward to next year, when the State of the Union is delivered by someone else. Someone more attuned to the plight of the human-animal. Maybe a centaur.

[The Topical Satire Initiative is Rachel Axler, Kevin Bleyer, Rich Blomquist, Steve Bodow, Tim Carvell, Scott Jacobson, Rob Kutner, Josh Lieb and Sam Means, who, when gainfully employed, write funny stuff for “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.”]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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Roll Over, Trickster — Make Room For The Dubster And The Dickster

What this country needs is a good impeachment proceeding. John McCain can play the Barry Goldwater role and tell The Dubster, as Goldwater told The Trickster: "We don't have the votes to save you." Instead of the final plane ride to San Clemente, it will be the final plane ride to Crawford. If this is (fair & balanced) truth to 935 counts of perjury, so be it.

[x Philadelphia Fishwrap]
Judiciary Committee Should Move to Impeach Bush and Cheney
By Elizabeth Holtzman

Since mid-December, members of the House Judiciary Committee Robert Wexler (D., Fla.), Luis Gutierrez (D., Ill.) and Tammy Baldwin (D., Wis.) have called for hearings on the impeachment of Vice President Cheney.

This should not be surprising, given the strength of the case for impeachment. What’s surprising is that it took so long for members of this committee, normally tasked with holding impeachment proceedings, to call for them.

They face huge political resistance on Capitol Hill. But they aren’t alone. Other Democratic members are joining them. Former senator and Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern recently published an op-ed demanding impeachment proceedings for both Bush and Cheney. Bruce Fein, a Republican who served in the Reagan Justice Department, and many other constitutional scholars also argue for impeachment.

There is more than ample justification for impeachment. The Constitution specifies the grounds as treason, bribery or “high crimes and misdemeanors,” a term that means “great and dangerous offenses that subvert the Constitution.” As the House Judiciary Committee determined during Watergate, impeachment is warranted when a president puts himself above the law and gravely abuses power.

Have Bush and Cheney done that?

Yes. With the vice president’s participation, President Bush repeatedly violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court approval for presidential wiretaps. Former President Richard Nixon’s illegal wiretapping was one of the offenses that led to his impeachment. FISA was enacted precisely to avoid such abuses by future presidents.

Bush and Cheney were involved in detainee abuse, flouting federal criminal statutes (the War Crimes Act of 1996 and the anti-torture Act) and the Geneva Conventions. The president removed Geneva protections from al-Qaeda and the Taliban, setting the abuse in motion, and may have even personally authorized them.

The president and vice president also used deception to drive us into the Iraq war, claiming Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were in cahoots, when they knew better. They invoked the specter of a nuclear attack on the United States, alleging Hussein purchased uranium in Niger and wanted aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment, when they had every reason to know these claims were phony or at least seriously questioned within the administration. Withholding and distorting facts usurps Congress’ constitutional powers to decide on going to war.

Can a commander-in-chief disobey laws on wiretapping or torture to protect the country in wartime?

No. The Constitution requires the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” The Supreme Court ruled Harry S. Truman could not seize steel mills to prevent a strike, even during the Korean War. Nixon’s claim of national security as a justification for illegal wiretaps was also rejected in impeachment proceedings against him.

What then is the justification for taking impeachment “off the table”? Congressional leaders don’t defend the administration, nor do they contend that its actions are unimpeachable or less serious than Nixon’s. Instead they argue there is no time, or that impeachment proceedings would distract the Congress from other work, or divide the country. The subtext seems to be fear that impeachment could undermine Democratic election prospects in 2008.

But even these “pragmatic” arguments are wrong. Let’s take them one at a time:

Insufficient time. In the case of Nixon, the House officially instructed the Judiciary Committee to act in early February 1974. The committee finished voting on articles of impeachment July 29, less than six months later. No presidential impeachment proceeding had taken place for almost 100 years, so the committee had to start from scratch, analyzing the Constitution and developing procedures for the impeachment inquiry. Now that the relevant legal spade work is done and a road map for proper impeachment proceedings exists, Congress might conduct them even faster than in 1974.

Distraction. During Watergate, the impeachment inquiry didn’t prevent Congress from getting its work done. In fact, the House Judiciary Committee also worked on other matters during impeachment, just as the Senate did during its impeachment trial of former President Bill Clinton.

Divisiveness. True, President Clinton’s impeachment was a highly partisan process that divided the country - because most Americans didn’t support it. They believed his conduct was reprehensible, but not an impeachable offense. Impeachment therefore had negative repercussions for the Republicans who instigated it.

Nixon’s impeachment united the American people. The process was bipartisan, demonstrating this wasn’t just a Democratic ploy to undo an election. The fairness of the process, the seriousness of purpose, the substantial evidence - all gave the public confidence that justice had been done. This reinvigorated the shared value that the rule of law and preservation of democracy are more important than any president or party.

This value is again asserting itself in grassroots impeachment movements across America. The Vermont Senate, several state Democratic parties, and many municipal governments have adopted resolutions supporting impeachment. More state legislatures would have acted except for pressure from Washington. Many polls show a majority of Americans support impeaching Cheney (a Nov. 13 American Research Group poll says 70 percent of Americans believe he abused his office), and slightly less than a majority support impeaching Bush.

Stonewalling such widespread public sentiment is itself divisive, leading at least half the country to feel their concerns about upholding the Constitution are being ignored. Only a serious airing of evidence in hearings would heal the split.

Undermining election prospects. When the impeachment process began, Nixon had just been reelected in one of the largest landslides in history. Few, if any, worried about whether impeachment was a political winner for Congress or the Democrats. Public opinion simply forced Congress’ hand when Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. After the Judiciary Committee conducted impartial hearings and voted on impeachment, Congress’ approval ratings soared. Republicans were swamped in the November 1974 elections.

Whether or not they bring electoral rewards in 2008, impeachment proceedings are the right thing to do. They will help curb the serious abuses of this administration, and send a strong message to future administrations that no president or vice president is above the law.

[Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman (D-NY, 16th District) served on the House Judiciary Committee during proceedings toward Nixon’s impeachment. She coauthored the 1973 special-prosecutor statute, and cowrote (with Cynthia L. Cooper) The Impeachment of George W. Bush in 2006.]

Copyright © 2008 Philadelphia Inquirer

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935 Lies? What Did They Know And When Did They Know It? What Are We Going To Do About It?

Lies leading to the deaths of thousands of U. S. troops and the maiming of thousands more as well as the deaths and destruction that has befallen the civilian population of Iraq are high crimes and misdemeanors. Now is time for impeachment and conviction of those who knowingly lied to us and to the world. We should, at long last, show the world that we are a nation of laws, not a nation of perjurors. If The Trickster was sent packing from Washington in 1974, The Dubster deserves no less in 2008. Let his successor pardon him. If this is (fair & balanced) treason, make the most of it.

Click on this link for the full report ("Iraq: The War Card — Orchestrated Deception On The Path To War") that goes beyond the following executive summary.

[x Center for Public Integrity]
False Pretenses
By Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith

Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Click on image to enlarge (935 Lies, Month By Month)

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration's case for war.

It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose "Duelfer Report" established that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq's nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to restart it.

In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most false statements, according to this first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric.

President Bush, for example, made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and McClellan (with 14).

The massive database at the heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews.

Consider, for example, these false public statements made in the run-up to war:

On August 26, 2002, in an address to the national convention of the Veteran of Foreign Wars, Cheney flatly declared: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." In fact, former CIA Director George Tenet later recalled, Cheney's assertions went well beyond his agency's assessments at the time. Another CIA official, referring to the same speech, told journalist Ron Suskind, "Our reaction was, 'Where is he getting this stuff from?'"

In the closing days of September 2002, with a congressional vote fast approaching on authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, Bush told the nation in his weekly radio address: "The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. . . . This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year." A few days later, similar findings were also included in a much-hurried National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction — an analysis that hadn't been done in years, as the intelligence community had deemed it unnecessary and the White House hadn't requested it.

In July 2002, Rumsfeld had a one-word answer for reporters who asked whether Iraq had relationships with Al Qaeda terrorists: "Sure." In fact, an assessment issued that same month by the Defense Intelligence Agency (and confirmed weeks later by CIA Director Tenet) found an absence of "compelling evidence demonstrating direct cooperation between the government of Iraq and Al Qaeda." What's more, an earlier DIA assessment said that "the nature of the regime's relationship with Al Qaeda is unclear."

On May 29, 2003, in an interview with Polish TV, President Bush declared: "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories." But as journalist Bob Woodward reported in State of Denial, days earlier a team of civilian experts dispatched to examine the two mobile labs found in Iraq had concluded in a field report that the labs were not for biological weapons. The team's final report, completed the following month, concluded that the labs had probably been used to manufacture hydrogen for weather balloons.

On January 28, 2003, in his annual State of the Union address, Bush asserted: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." Two weeks earlier, an analyst with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research sent an email to colleagues in the intelligence community laying out why he believed the uranium-purchase agreement "probably is a hoax."

On February 5, 2003, in an address to the United Nations Security Council, Powell said: "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources." As it turned out, however, two of the main human sources to which Powell referred had provided false information. One was an Iraqi con artist, code-named "Curveball," whom American intelligence officials were dubious about and in fact had never even spoken to. The other was an Al Qaeda detainee, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who had reportedly been sent to Eqypt by the CIA and tortured and who later recanted the information he had provided. Libi told the CIA in January 2004 that he had "decided he would fabricate any information interrogators wanted in order to gain better treatment and avoid being handed over to [a foreign government]."

The false statements dramatically increased in August 2002, with congressional consideration of a war resolution, then escalated through the mid-term elections and spiked even higher from January 2003 to the eve of the invasion.

It was during those critical weeks in early 2003 that the president delivered his State of the Union address and Powell delivered his memorable U.N. presentation. For all 935 false statements, including when and where they occurred, go to the search page for this project; the methodology used for this analysis is explained here.

In addition to their patently false pronouncements, Bush and these seven top officials also made hundreds of other statements in the two years after 9/11 in which they implied that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or links to Al Qaeda. Other administration higher-ups, joined by Pentagon officials and Republican leaders in Congress, also routinely sounded false war alarms in the Washington echo chamber.

The cumulative effect of these false statements — amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts — was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war. Some journalists — indeed, even some entire news organizations — have since acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far too deferential and uncritical. These mea culpas notwithstanding, much of the wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, "independent" validation of the Bush administration's false statements about Iraq.

The "ground truth" of the Iraq war itself eventually forced the president to backpedal, albeit grudgingly. In a 2004 appearance on NBC's Meet the Press, for example, Bush acknowledged that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. And on December 18, 2005, with his approval ratings on the decline, Bush told the nation in a Sunday-night address from the Oval Office: "It is true that Saddam Hussein had a history of pursuing and using weapons of mass destruction. It is true that he systematically concealed those programs, and blocked the work of U.N. weapons inspectors. It is true that many nations believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As your president, I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq. Yet it was right to remove Saddam Hussein from power."

Bush stopped short, however, of admitting error or poor judgment; instead, his administration repeatedly attributed the stark disparity between its prewar public statements and the actual "ground truth" regarding the threat posed by Iraq to poor intelligence from a Who's Who of domestic agencies.

On the other hand, a growing number of critics, including a parade of former government officials, have publicly — and in some cases vociferously — accused the president and his inner circle of ignoring or distorting the available intelligence. In the end, these critics say, it was the calculated drumbeat of false information and public pronouncements that ultimately misled the American people and this nation's allies on their way to war.

Bush and the top officials of his administration have so far largely avoided the harsh, sustained glare of formal scrutiny about their personal responsibility for the litany of repeated, false statements in the run-up to the war in Iraq. There has been no congressional investigation, for example, into what exactly was going on inside the Bush White House in that period. Congressional oversight has focused almost entirely on the quality of the U.S. government's pre-war intelligence — not the judgment, public statements, or public accountability of its highest officials. And, of course, only four of the officials — Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz — have testified before Congress about Iraq.

Short of such review, this project provides a heretofore unavailable framework for examining how the U.S. war in Iraq came to pass. Clearly, it calls into question the repeated assertions of Bush administration officials that they were the unwitting victims of bad intelligence.

Above all, the 935 false statements painstakingly presented here finally help to answer two all-too-familiar questions as they apply to Bush and his top advisers: What did they know, and when did they know it?

[Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, created and directed this project. He is the president of the Fund for Independence in Journalism in Washington, a distinguished journalist in residence at American University, and the coauthor of five books, including the bestseller, The Buying of the President 2004 (HarperCollins). He founded the Center for Public Integrity in 1989 and was its executive director for 15 years. From 1977 to 1988 he did investigative reporting at ABC News and at CBS News's 60 Minutes. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998 and PEN USA's First Amendment Award in 2004.

Mark Reading-Smith is the senior researcher/editor and writer at the Fund. In 2002 he was an intern at the Center for Public Integrity and conducted research for its best-selling book, The Buying of the President 2004. He is a graduate of Michigan State University.

Benjamin Turner was a researcher/editor at the Fund. He originally came to the organization as an intern. He helped to build the chronological database for this project and also was a researcher for the Fund's "Truth Project." He is a graduate of American University and is currently pursuing a law degree at the Syracuse University College of Law.

Matthew Lewis, a researcher/editor at the Fund, is a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he founded and edited a popular website for college sportswriters, The Heptagon, and worked for publications including The Wisconsin State Journal, Scout.com, and Rotowire.

Jeanne Brooks, the managing director of the Fund, previously worked for the New Hampshire Commission on the Status Women, where, among other projects, she assisted with the Women's Prison Project. She is a graduate of the University of New Hampshire.

Stephanie Carnes was a research intern at the Fund in the summer of 2007. She is an honors graduate of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and is currently working on a joint graduate degree in international law and international relations in Brussels, Belgium.

Jennifer Spector was a research intern at the Fund in the summer of 2006. She is currently a senior at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mike Holmes was a research intern at the Fund in 2005. He is a summa cum laude graduate of Howard University and is currently pursuing a master's degree in international affairs at Georgetown University.

Julia Dahl was an editor for the project. She is a freelance journalist in Brooklyn, New York, who reports regularly for the New York Post and The Real Deal and teaches writing for MediaBistro. Her articles have appeared in Salon, Slate, Seventeen, and Marie Claire, among many others. She is a graduate of Yale University and has a master's degree in journalism from American University.

Han Nguyen, a web development consultant for this project, was the Center for Public Integrity's software architect from 2002 to 2006 and the lead web developer for more than 20 of its projects and reports. He is a graduate of the College of William and Mary in 1995.]

Copyright © 2008 Center for Public Integrity

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Less Than A Year To Inauguration Day 2009!

A good friend forwarded this piece by Beth Quinn that has stirred the blogosphere of late. In 1932-1933, Woody Guthrie wrote a farewell to the outgoing Herbert Hoover: "He's gone, he's gone, Thank God, he's gone." Too bad Woody can't write a farewell to the Dubster. Beth Quinn's column will have to suffice. If this is (fair & balanced) nostalgia (for Woody Guthrie), so be it.

[x The Times Herald-Record (New York)]
Richonomics 101 in Post-Bush America
By Beth Quinn

I used to feel like a fool for not being rich.

I'd see friends taking great vacations, hiring nannies, buying fabulous cars and wearing expensive jewelry.

And I'd wonder, what’s wrong with me that I'm not rich? During the dot.com bubble in the ’90s, especially, it seemed like everyone else knew a money secret.

But not now.

Right now, I'm feeling rich - not so much for what I have but for what I don't have.

I don't have a sub prime mortgage. I don't have any credit card debt, either. And I don't owe more on my house than I can sell it for.

With our economy tanking big-time now, that makes me part of the nouveau riche.

In fact, I was made for the coming recession. I'm so used to not being rich, I'm hardly going to notice. I stopped buying things I couldn't pay for a long time ago because I couldn't stand the pain in my stomach when I'd open a credit card bill.

In fact, if my household economy were in the same shape as America’s right now, I'd be sitting on the edge of the bathtub holding my gut and rocking back and forth because I'd be on the verge of puking.

Bush inherited a robust economy and a $127 billion surplus - and he’s squandered it all like he was playing the slots in Atlantic City, betting the rent, the food, the furniture and our grandchildren’s future in the process.

He lost it all and racked up a record $5 trillion debt in the process. China owns us.

Consider what my own household economy would be like if I ran it like Bush has run America. The facts and figures are from Joseph Stilt, an economics professor at Columbia:

He [W] gave multi-trillion-dollar tax breaks to the rich. (I could go on a spending spree if I didn't pay taxes! Like, I could buy a really cool-looking, expensive toilet with the money I saved by not helping the village maintain the sewer system.)

He [W] engaged in a ruinous war of choice in Iraq - a trillion-dollar war that’s being “paid for” off-budget. (I know! I could start a fire on the lawn of some guy my father hated and feed the flames with borrowed money.)

He [W] failed to invest in our decaying infrastructure, like levees in New Orleans and bridges in Minneapolis. (So what if the roof is leaking! My husband does a heck of a job bailing water with a bucket.)

He [W] failed to invest in basic technological research and failed to fund the education of engineers and scientists to compete with the new world brain trust in China and India. (I could create an empty slogan for my kids, kind of like “No Child Left Behind”! Much cheaper than helping them pay for college and med school.)

We’re just now opening the bill for all this proliferate spending. And we’re starting to feel the pain.

Some are losing their homes in mortgage defaults; many are thinking twice about the price of gas before taking a road trip; the poor are showing up in greater numbers at the food pantry.

And it’s going to get much worse - for a long time. The gap between the middle and upper classes has become a chasm.

But me, I'm rich. At least for the moment. I can afford Rimadyl for my dog Huck’s arthritis, I’ve got food in the freezer, and my 10-year-old car is paid for and running.

All the rest might be stuff I want, but it’s not stuff I need.

During the Great Depression, my mother’s family ate dandelion greens for salad with their dinner. Sometimes, dandelions were their dinner. They’re a little bitter, but they go down well with oil and vinegar. And they’re very nourishing.

That’s just a little tip to keep in mind should the day come when the cost of lettuce is too dear in your household, too.

* * *

There are 365 days ’til Jan. 20, 2009.

[Beth Quinn is the liberal columnist and health editor for the Times Herald-Record.]

Copyright © 2008 Hudson Valley Media Group

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Dick Cavett Suffers From Electile Dysfunction (And Doesn't Know It)

Dick Cavett fires the best zinger in his final sentence in this piece about our "Confederacy of Dunces." (RIP, John Kennedy Toole) If this is (fair & balanced) punditry, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
A Potpourri of Pols
By Dick Cavett

I can’t figure out what it is that keeps me watching the current star search for our next president.

It’s not all that compelling or entertaining. Or at any rate it certainly doesn’t rank anywhere near the three riveting television events of my lifetime: the Army-McCarthy hearings, Watergate and the O. J. Simpson trial. Things that, day after day, held you enthralled, afraid to look away for more than a moment for fear of missing the next bombshell.

And yet I dutifully watch Keith and Chris and Wolf and those Sunday morning talk shows Calvin Trillin has labeled “The Sabbath Gasbags.”

Admittedly, it’s all important stuff. But what is missing? We can surely agree there are damn few laughs (see Twain, below). Even inadvertent nastiness (when it is inadvertent) gets quickly apologized for. (Of course, by the time you read this there may have been out-of-control carnage.) Perhaps it’s that inexcusable thing I said in an acting class years ago, after a slight teenage girl had done a speech of King Lear’s: “For me, it lacked majesty.” The laugh it got still pains me.

Maybe it’s just that it is not indubitably and overwhelmingly obvious that a large number of the candidates, arrayed across the stage in bas-relief, are qualified to fill The Hardest Job in the World.

**********

In a much earlier column about John McCain in this space I posed the question: “What has happened to that man?” McCain had just participated in that ludicrous look-how-safe-Baghdad-has-become charade, sashaying around a seemingly unguarded open market. It was impressive and seemed to make its point — right up until it was revealed that just off camera our intrepid John was being protected by a throng of fully armed troops — fore and aft and hovering overhead. One of the shopkeepers seen on camera told a newsman, “Now I am a target.”

Despite that bruise to his integrity, McCain appears to be himself again. I do worry that near the end of the day he appears to be what the British call “puffed.” But so do they all. Isn’t it time some more humane way of campaigning was devised that didn’t nearly wreck the participants, what with the rushed meals and bad sleep and vocal strain (if not injury), and the stuffed-down local kitchen specialties and obligatory ethnic snacks and fatiguing killer schedules? Mightn’t the country miss out on fine, qualified potential presidents unwilling or unable to endure an ordeal that would tax a triathlete? I half-expect McCain to drolly observe that the Hanoi Hilton was at times restful compared to this.

It has to be awful on all of them, with the exception of Fred Thompson, who seems to be campaigning from a Barcalounger.

I find McCain — apart from his unwillingness to detach himself from his “victory in Iraq” mirage — greatly appealing. And, of the flock, he seems to be the one with a genuine sense of humor. He deserves the Best Comic Ad-lib trophy for his remark to Romney during a debate. Referring to Mitt’s so readily adjustable convictions, McCain said, “We agree — you are the candidate of change.”

Romney’s response was the predictably clunky one about getting personal, which has become the habitual refuge of the lackwit.

As a kid, I sent off for a book for performing magicians like myself called “Heckler Stoppers: Snappy Retorts for All Occasions.” Sadly, the wittiest of them were on the level of “Your mother wears army shoes.” But maybe some genuine wit could get rich putting one out for politicos lame in the quick-comeback department. If all those so impaired bought one, it would be an instant best-seller.

Political comic relief is not a trivial subject. All candidates should bear in mind Mark Twain’s edict that “Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”

**********

John of Arizona seems like a man you wouldn’t be afraid to trust with a preposterously difficult job like the one he is after. Though Dennis Kucinich is an interesting case. Whenever I’ve seen him answer a question he has done so thoughtfully, intelligently, manfully, forcefully and articulately. Yet he’s treated as no more electable than you or I. Is it merely his size and appearance? Where is it written that a candidate bearing a greater resemblance to a garden gnome than to Mr. America can’t be president? Had Dennis been born into Mitt Romney’s body might this campaign be a whole different story?

And what of the current occupant of Romney’s body? He fascinates me. He’s intelligent, knowledgeable-seeming, handsome, well-dressed and groomed, pleasant, and mature in manner. So why does something emanating from him seem to whisper the word “bogus”?

Part of it could be his hair. To my eye it just might be an expert colorist job — an indicative lapse in that alleged sine qua non, authenticity — with those artful white flecks here and there and the “Paulie Walnuts” temple patches. I may be doing him a disservice. It may be a case of nature and not artifice, in which case I should be forced to apologize in this space and to down a bottle of Shinola Black in public.

There is one question I have not seen Romney asked. It’s the one a friend dared me to put to John Wayne when he appeared on a show of mine: Sir, how is it that neither you nor any of your multiple strapping sons have ever served a day in the armed forces?

(I confess that I didn’t ask Mr. Wayne because I so wanted the Duke to like me. I sure liked him.)

**********

If Hillary Clinton’s so-called “cry” was planned, she is, along with her other talents, one hell of an actress. But for my money, her greatest moment was that niftily executed and funny response to the boorish query about how she felt about being lacking in the “likability” department. If it was meant to put her off, it backfired. Her “Well, that hurts my feelings” and “But I’ll try to go on” could hardly have been delivered better by Meryl Streep. Or Elaine May.

Barack Obama seems a sort of miracle. He has only frightened me once, when he seemed to have fallen into the royal “we.” The one favored by monarchs and also by athletes, usually in conjunction with their expressed gratitude to God for choosing their side to win. To borrow from Mark T. again, somewhere he said that “only presidents, editors and people with tapeworm have the right to use the editorial ‘we.’”

This campaign seems unusually free of inside dirt and nasty rumors. There have been some touchy moments and less than pure remarks and tactics, but certainly nothing shattering nor comparable to the tactics of the low-brow thugs who gave us Swiftboats. Fortunately there’s plenty of time left for all that. My only possible offering in that regard is from a distinguished friend who worked alongside Rudolph Giuliani on some New York City project. His take? “That is a bad man.”
I irresponsibly throw that in for what it’s worth.

Would anyone be upset if I knocked off at this point? Meanwhile, let’s all remember that there is one blessing that all of the candidates can revel in and enjoy: They needn’t have any fears about being inferior to the incumbent.

[The host of “The Dick Cavett Show” — which aired on ABC from 1968 to 1975 and on public television from 1977 to 1982 — Dick Cavett is also the coauthor of two books, Cavett (1974) and Eye on Cavett (1983). He has appeared on Broadway in “Otherwise Engaged” “Into the Woods” and as narrator in “The Rocky Horror Show,” and has made guest appearances in movies and on TV shows including “Forrest Gump” and “The Simpsons.” Mr. Cavett lives in New York City and Montauk, N.Y.]


Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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More Funeral Etiquette, Courtesy Of Rat

Today's installment of Rat at a stranger's post-funeral meal is LOL funny. Translation: Laugh-out-loud funny. Rat has got to be the worst, most cynical character in the "funny papers." If this is (fair & balanced) synchronicity, so be it.



[x Pearls Before Swine]

Click on image to enlarge [01/22/2008]

[Stephan Pastis is an attorney-cum-cartoonist and a world-class connoisseur of cynicism.]

Copyright © 2008 Stephan Pastis

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Electile Dysfunction? A Word Of Advice From... Tehran?

A good friend sent along a pair of forwarded e-mail messages this AM. The first alarm noted the financial turmoil of the day in overseas markets and the fear that the U. S. market was going down like a runaway elevator.

This very morning, the NY Fishwrap reported: "Stocks Open Sharply Lower Despite Interest-Rate Cut

"Within minutes of the opening bell in New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 400 points, or 3.5 percent, and other major indexes also slid. The Nasdaq Composite was down more than 5 percent."

What can be done? Not much, I'm afraid. An Iranian economist (no less) wrote about our national economic malaise and pinned his hopes on U. S. leaders finding "(a)... solution to the U.S. debt problem that requires radical measures, including: the elimination of corporate tax loopholes, a reversal of tax breaks for the ultra-rich, a bipartisan campaign to eliminate budget 'pork,' imposition of stringent limits on corporate debt and speculative lending, a vast reduction in military expenditure and, finally, an additional 50 cent per gallon gasoline tax that would slash the federal deficit, curtail energy waste and spur technological breakthroughs."

My friend also forwarded a new term that describes the potential leaders who would deal with the debt problem that looms like an iceberg in the path of the ship of state:

"Electile Dysfunction: the inability to become aroused over any of the choices for president put forth by either party in the 2008 election year."

If this is (fair & balanced) gloom, so be it.

[The International Herald Tribune]
A debt culture gone awry
By Hamid Varzi

The U.S. economy, once the envy of the world, is now viewed across the globe with suspicion. America has become shackled by an immovable mountain of debt that endangers its prosperity and threatens to bring the rest of the world economy crashing down with it.

The ongoing sub-prime mortgage crisis, a result of irresponsible lending policies designed to generate commissions for unscrupulous brokers, presages far deeper problems in a U.S. economy that is beginning to resemble a giant smoke-and-mirrors Ponzi scheme. And this has not been lost on the rest of the world.

This new reality has had unfortunate side effects that go beyond economics. As a banker working in the heart of the Muslim world, I have been amazed by the depth and breadth of anti-Americanism, even among U.S. allies, manifested in reactions ranging from fierce anger to stoic fatalism. Muslims outside the United States interpret America's policies in the Middle East not as an effort to spread democracy but as a blatant neocolonialist attempt to solve its economic problems by force. Arabs and Persians alike argue that America's fiscal irresponsibility has forced the nation to seek solutions through military aggression.

Many believe that America's misguided adventure in Iraq was a desperate attempt to capture both a reliable source of cheap oil and a major export market for the United States.

The United States borrows a whopping $2.5 billion daily from abroad to service its burgeoning debt. In order to continue borrowing at reasonable interest rates America needs to retain credibility with its overseas creditors, especially Far Eastern nations running huge trade surpluses. A cessation of foreign lending would force the Fed to raise interest rates to attract money, precipitating a collapse of the already weak housing market and pushing the economy into recession.

This is why the Chinese, in particular, have threatened to retaliate against proposed U.S. trade sanctions by reducing their $1.3 trillion in dollar holdings.

The U.S. debt situation is so grave that the Chinese would not even need to "dump dollars" to precipitate a meltdown but could simply refuse to extend further credit: They could cease purchasing additional Treasury Bonds and Treasury Bills, without selling any excess inventory. China has the far stronger hand, because a run on the dollar would merely reduce China's gigantic cash surplus while increasing America's debt burden to astronomical levels.

U.S. debt affects all nations, but in surprisingly different ways: Third world farmers suffer from the effects of gigantic U.S. farm subsidies aimed at reducing the trade deficit, while Russia has actually profited from America's lack of discipline.

Flush with funds generated from a decade of trade and account surpluses, Russia views U.S. sensitivity to its expansionist energy policy as a response to America's own failure to reduce energy waste and exploit alternative energy sources when it had the opportunity to do so. In sum, American economic decadence has become a source of Russian strength.

America's supply-side economists argue that there is nothing wrong with going into debt, but this is valid only as long as a nation and its consumers are gaining something in return.

What have Americans gained from their nation's mountain of debt? A crumbling infrastructure, a manufacturing base that has declined 60 percent since World War II, a rise in the wealth gap, the lowest consumer-savings rate since the depths of the Great Depression, 50 million Americans without health insurance, an educational system in decline and a shrinking dollar that makes foreign travel a luxury.

The best cars, the best bridges and highways, the fastest trains and the tallest buildings are all to be found outside America's borders. Supply-siders ignore the crucial distinction between, on the one hand, debt employed as an investment vehicle to enhance competitiveness and, on the other, debt used to pay off current expenses and to create even more debt.

The bottom line is that America is awash in red ink and seeks the wrong solutions to its debt problems. A return to fiscal responsibility would make America far stronger, both domestically and internationally, than would a continuation of current policies that falsely project strength through idle protectionist threats and failed military aggression.

Current tensions between the United States and the rest of the world will continue as long as America's military bark is louder than its economic bite.

A solution to the U.S. debt problem requires radical measures, including: the elimination of corporate tax loopholes, a reversal of tax breaks for the ultra-rich, a bipartisan campaign to eliminate budget "pork," imposition of stringent limits on corporate debt and speculative lending, a vast reduction in military expenditure and, finally, an additional 50 cent per gallon gasoline tax that would slash the federal deficit, curtail energy waste and spur technological breakthroughs.

Let us hope America heeds the warnings, dispenses with junk-food economics and embraces a crucial diet of fiscal discipline. It remains to be seen, however, whether America's political leaders have the courage to instigate such reforms, and whether Congress is finally willing to do something for the future of ordinary, hard-working Americans.

[Hamid Varzi is an economist and banker based in Tehran.]

Copyright © 2008 The International Herald Tribune

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Truth To Power: A Pulitzer Prize Winner Two-Fer

Samuel Johnson would approve of the most recent op-ed essays by Nicholas Kristof and Maureen Dowd in yesterday's NY Fishwrap. Both writers, in their own ways, attacked cant in our times. The dictonary defines cant as the expression or repetition of conventional or trite opinions or sentiments; especially, the insincere use of pious words. I learned this word as a callow undergrad in an English lit survey course. The subject of the day was Samuel Johnson, the great 18th century wit and lexicographer. Johnson's words were captured by James Boswell, his biographer, as Boswell and Dr. Johnson had this exchange about cant:

Boswell. "Have not they vexed yourself a little, Sir? Have not you been vexed by all the turbulence of this reign, and by that absurd vote of the House of Commons, 'That the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished'?"

Johnson. "Sir, I have never slept an hour less, nor eat an ounce less meat. I would have knocked the factious dogs on the head, to be sure; but I was not vexed." Boswell. "I declare, Sir, upon my honour, I did imagine I was vexed, and took a pride in it; but it was, perhaps, cant; for I own I neither ate less, nor slept less." Johnson. "My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, 'Sir, I am your most humble servant. You are not his most humble servant. You may say, 'These are sad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times." You don't mind the times. You tell a man, "I am sorry you had such bad weather the last day of your journey, and were so much wet." You don't care six-pence whether he was wet or dry. You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society; but don't think foolishly."

Kristof and Dowd do not speak foolishly, nor do they think foolishly. Dr. Johnson would nod in agreement if he could read Kristof and Dowd. If this is (fair & balanced) anti-cant, so be it.

(1)
[x NY Fishwrap]
Hillary, Barack, Experience
By Nicholaw D. Kristof

With all the sniping from the Clinton camp about whether Barack Obama has enough experience to make a strong president, consider another presidential candidate who was far more of a novice. He had the gall to run for president even though he had served a single undistinguished term in the House of Representatives, before being hounded back to his district.

That was Abraham Lincoln.

Another successful president scorned any need for years of apprenticeship in Washington, declaring, “The same old experience is not relevant.” He suggested that the most useful training comes not from hanging around the White House and Congress but rather from experience “rooted in the real lives of real people” so that “it will bring real results if we have the courage to change.”

That was Bill Clinton running in 1992 against George H. W. Bush, who was then trumpeting his own experience over the callow youth of Mr. Clinton. That year Mr. Bush aired a television commercial urging voters to keep America “in the hands of experience.”

It might seem obvious that long service in Washington is the best preparation for the White House, but on the contrary, one lesson of American history is that length of experience in national politics is an extremely poor predictor of presidential success.

Looking at the 19 presidents since 1900, three of the greatest were among those with the fewest years in electoral politics. Teddy Roosevelt had been a governor for two years and vice president for six months; Woodrow Wilson, a governor for just two years; and Franklin Roosevelt, a governor for four years. None ever served in Congress.

They all did have executive experience (as did Mr. Clinton), actually running something larger than a Senate office. Maybe that’s something voters should think about more: governors have often made better presidents than senators. But that’s not a good Democratic talking point, because the candidates with the greatest administrative experience by far are Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee.

Alternatively, look at the five presidents since 1900 with perhaps the most political experience when taking office: William McKinley, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush. They had great technical skills — but not one was among our very greatest presidents.

The point is not that experience is pointless but that it needn’t be in politics to be useful. John McCain’s years as a P.O.W. gave him an understanding of torture and a moral authority to discuss it that no amount of Senate hearings ever could have conferred.

In the same way, Mr. Obama’s years as an antipoverty organizer give him insights into one of our greatest challenges: how to end cycles of poverty. That front-line experience is one reason Mr. Obama not only favors government spending programs, like early-childhood education, but also cultural initiatives like promoting responsible fatherhood.

Then there’s Mr. Obama’s grade-school years in Indonesia. Our most serious mistakes in foreign policy, from Vietnam to Iraq, have been a blindness to other people’s nationalism and an inability to see ourselves as others see us. Mr. Obama seems to have absorbed an intuitive sensitivity to that problem. For starters, he understood back in 2002 that American troops would not be greeted in Iraq with flowers.

In politics, Mr. Obama’s preparation is indeed thin, though it’s more than Hillary Rodham Clinton acknowledges. His seven years in the Illinois State Senate aren’t heavily scrutinized, but he scored significant achievements there: a law to videotape police interrogations in capital cases; an earned income tax credit to fight poverty; an expansion of early-childhood education.

Mrs. Clinton’s strength is her mastery of the details of domestic and foreign policy, unrivaled among the candidates; she speaks fluently about what to do in Pakistan, Iraq, Darfur. Mr. Obama’s strength is his vision and charisma and the possibility that his election would heal divisions at home and around the world. John Edwards’s strength is his common touch and his leadership among the candidates in establishing detailed positions on health care, poverty and foreign aid.

Those are the meaningful distinctions in the Democratic field, not Mrs. Clinton’s spurious claim to “35 years of experience.” The Democrats with the greatest Washington expertise — Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and Bill Richardson — have already been driven from the race. And the presidential candidate left standing with the greatest experience by far is Mr. McCain; if Mrs. Clinton believes that’s the criterion for selecting the next president, she might consider backing him.

To put it another way, think which politician is most experienced today in the classic sense, and thus — according to the “experience” camp — best qualified to become the next president.

That’s Dick Cheney. And I rest my case.

[Nicholas D. Kristof writes op-ed columns that appear twice each week in The New York Times. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner (1990, with his wife—Sheryl WuDunn—on the Tiananmen Square democracy movement and 2006, for reportage from Darfur), Kristof previously was associate managing editor of The Times, responsible for the Sunday Times. This is his first Op-Ed column following a book sabbatical.]

(2)
[x NY Fishwrap]

Red, White and Blue Tag Sale
By Maureen Dowd

When President Bush finished doing his sword dances and Arabian stallion inspections, when he finished making a speech in Abu Dhabi on the importance of freedom that fell flat, when he finished lounging in his fur-lined George of Arabia robe in the Saudi king’s tent, he came home.

Or he came to what was left of home.

A Washington Post cartoon by Tom Toles summed it up best: “Great to be home,” W. enthuses on Air Force One, heading toward the East Coast. “Anything interesting happen while I was gone?” Hanging on the skyline of New York is a sign reading: “U.S.A. Now a Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Foreign Investors.”

Wherever he went, W. seemed dazzled by the can-do spirit of the J. Pierrepont Finches of the new Middle East. “It’s important for the president to hear thoughts, hopes, dreams, aspirations, concerns from folks that are out making a living,” he told Saudi entrepreneurs.

In Dubai, he commended young Arab leaders, saying, “The entrepreneurial spirit is strong.”

In Abu Dhabi, he marveled at the royal family’s plans to build a city based entirely upon renewable energy. “Amazing, isn’t it?” W. said.

You know you’re in trouble when your Middle East oil pump is greener than you are.

Even as W. played cheerleader for Arab business, the Arabs were cleaning our clocks — then buying them. Our addiction to oil has allowed our pushers in the Persian Gulf to go on a shopping spree to snap us up.

Hillary Clinton was right when she said it was “pathetic” that President Bush had to beg the Saudis to drop the price of oil.

One cascading rationale he offered for invading Iraq was the benign domino theory, that bringing democracy to Iraq would sway the autocrats in the region to be less repressive.

But when W. visited Saudi Arabia and Egypt last week, he did not have the whip hand. He could not demand anything of the autocrats in the way of more rights for women and dissidents, much less get the Saudis to help on oil production. He needs their help in corralling Iran, which has been puffed up by the occupation of Iraq.

So he was a supplicant in Saudi Arabia. The American economy is a supplicant, too.

Two decades ago, we fretted that Japan was taking over America when Sony bought Columbia Pictures and Mitsubishi bought a chunk of Rockefeller Center. But they overpaid for everything.

Now, because of Wall Street’s overreaching, our economy depends on foreign oil and foreign loans to stay afloat.

China and Arab countries have a staggering amount of treasury securities. And the oil-rich countries are sitting on so many petrodollars that they are looking beyond prestige hotels and fashion labels and taking advantage of the fire sale to buy eye-popping stakes in our major financial institutions.

Like the president, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch came with tin cups to Middle Eastern, Asian and American investors last week, for a combined total of nearly $19.1 billion, after the subprime mortgage debacle blew up their books.

Citigroup, which raised $7.5 billion from Abu Dhabi in November, raised another $12.5 billion, including from Singapore, Kuwait and Saudi Prince Walid bin Talal. Merrill Lynch gave $6.6 billion in preferred stock to Kuwait, South Korea, a Japanese bank and others.

(While the great sage Bob Rubin was advising Hillary Clinton on sound fiscal policy, he seemed to be asleep at the Citigroup switch.)

As Warren Buffett has said, we are giving ourselves a party to feed our appetite for oil and imported goods and paying for it by selling off the furniture, our most precious assets.

When the president got back Thursday night from a trip that made it clear he has no clout overseas, he had to rush the ailing economy into intensive care.

Next to the cool, strong euro, the dollar is a comparative runt in the world’s currencies. The weak dollar lets foreigners snap up real estate in Manhattan.

It is striking that the Bush scion, who has tried so hard to do the opposite of his father, also ends up facing the prospect of a recession in his final year in office.

Maybe if the president had spent the trillion he squandered on his Iraq odyssey on energy research, we might have broken the oil addiction.

Now it’s a race between Iraq, stupid, or the economy, stupid, to see which one will usher out W.

The country is engaged in a fit of nativism and Lou Dobbsism, obsessing about the millions of Mexicans who might be sneaking across the border when billions in foreign money are pouring into Citigroup. You figure out what might be a bigger problem.

The national boundaries that really matter are the financial ones: Who’s going to own the American economy?

[Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary (on the Clinton impeachment scandal), became a columnist on The New York Times Op-Ed page in 1995.]
Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Comapny

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Rat's Guide To Funeral Etiquette

Pig is curious about Rat's interest in attending the funeral of someone unknown to either of them. Goat is the most rational (and sensible) resident of the strip and Pig asks Goat about attending a complete stranger's funeral just to chow done on the food after the service. Goat, of course, is shocked that anyone would would stoop to such subtrefuge for a free meal. If this is (fair & balanced) grief therapy, so be it

[x Pearls Before Swine]

Click image to enlarge (01/21/2008)

[Stephan Pastis is an attorney-cum-cartoonist who maintained his interest in UCLA Law School by creating Rat stories in his class notebook margins. It is no coincidence that Rat moonlights as a lawyer in this strip. Stephan actually practiced law in the San Francisco Bay Area before succumbing to full-time cartooning. Pastis lives with his family in northern California.]

Copyright © 2008 Stephan Pastis

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Race To The Finish

Timothy Egan gave this blog "2-Buck Huck" and now he plays the race card in the best possible sense. If this is (fair & balanced) polychromatism, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Race Bait
By Timothy Egan

On the West Coast, we are the deepest of blue state America (Washington State). We have ditched our badges of tribal politics for a post-racial era. We can break the padlocks of prejudice, and why not?

That’s what we tell ourselves.

But recent experience shows that campaigning with color is fraught with peril – even in the most liberal of precincts. As Senator Barack Obama may soon find out, it’s O.K. to make history, to allow people to feel good while making history, to be an abstraction. But it’s quite another to be “the black guy.”

For a while, it looked like Obama could be the rare African-American leader whose race was nearly invisible – and he may still be. He’s post-Civil Rights, Oprah-branded, with that classically American blend of a mother from the heartland and a father from a distant shore. And after that Iowa victory speech, people felt something had passed into our collective rear-view mirror, without actually saying what that something was.

Now it looks like every mention of race – from the overblown dust-up with Senator Hillary Clinton this week to the calculated comments comparing him to Sidney Poitier – is bad for Obama. A victory in South Carolina, with its heavy black vote, will be seen as one-dimensional.

He needs people to look at him and see John Kennedy, or The Beatles, or Tiger Woods in his first Master’s tournament. He needs people to see youth, a break with the past, style under pressure.

When they see black this or black that — even a positive black first — it’s trouble.

I say this from the experience of having followed as a reporter two of the most talented African-American politicians in the land — Norm Rice, the former Seattle mayor, and Ron Sims, the chief executive of King County, the 12th most populous county in the United States, which includes Seattle. In their earlier campaigns, race was not a factor because people were too nice, in our Northwest, Scandinavian-liberal tradition, to bring it up.

And so it seemed reasonable that both men could step up. Rice ran for governor, and so did Sims, in separate open elections. Rice lost to a man who became America’s first Chinese-American governor. Sims lost to a woman.

In both cases, barriers were broken. But the ceiling seemed to remain only for blacks. What happened to them is what could lie ahead for Obama.

“He’s got to stay away from race,” said Sims when I spoke to him this week. “He’s got to stay away from it. Race remains the one thing a black cannot talk about openly in a political campaign in this country.”

Obama understands this, and thus the truce on the subject has been called. “I know everyone is focused on racial history,” he said at a church service last Sunday. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

Tuesday night’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas was supposed to be about black-brown issues, but race was quickly taken off the table. “Senator Obama and I agree,” said Senator Clinton. “Neither race nor gender should be a part of this campaign.”

But race and gender will follow these two to the end. Conservatives believe Obama wouldn’t even be a top tier candidate were he not black – a reach, to anyone who has seen this once-in-a-generation politician on the campaign trail.

Look at what’s happened since race was injected into the campaign. What tipped it off was a debate over the roles that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson played in bringing about lasting civil rights changes. Hillary said one thing. Barack demurred. Blah, blah, blah. Race war!

Just like that, all the old unmentionables came out of the shadows. And just like that, voters gravitated to their respective tribes. Obama beat Clinton among white women in Iowa, and Clinton was leading among blacks nationwide last year. Now it’s reversed – Clinton leading whites, blacks switching to Obama in droves. Hispanics are the wild card, and we’ll know a lot more after Saturday’s caucuses in Nevada, where nearly one in four residents is Latino.

Where all of this goes now depends on whether the race genie goes back in the bottle. Again, history is a guide. The trick for a black politician in a nation where only 12 percent are African-American is to find a shared narrative.

In the Washington governor’s race, the Chinese-American, Gary Locke, could call himself “a person of color” because his larger story – an immigrant’s son – was similar to that of so many voters. With Norm Rice and Ron Sims, the narrative had to involve slavery, no matter how they approached it.

“I have a great story about how my family came to America, as good as Gary’s,” as Rice said. “We just happened to have different travel agents.”

Obama, with a father from Kenya, may have been given a pass in the minds of many white voters – no multi-generational racial baggage. He may still get that pass.

But he has to be careful. As the voting patterns showed in solid, Yankee, tolerant New Hampshire, people still seem to lie when it comes to race. Or maybe people who dislike black politicians just don’t talk to pollsters. Whatever the reason, there is a gap, and it’s real.

Strip away the nonsense that started this intra-family feud and you find one epic problem for Obama: how to make history, without mentioning what is so historic about his candidacy.

[Timothy Egan worked for 18 years as a writer for The New York Times, first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, then as a national enterprise reporter. In 2006, Mr. Egan won the National Book Award for his history of people who lived through the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time. In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America." Mr. Egan is the author of five books, including The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, and Lasso the Wind, Away to the New West. He lives in Seattle.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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Fear Doesn't Strike Out

Fear of failure, fear of loss, or fear of fear are powerful motivators. Today, a literate former MLB player offered the player's insight into pressures to perform at the highest level in sport. At a time when the world is going to Hell in a handbasket, we've got a congressional committee holding hearings on the use of performance enhancing drugs in the major leagues. In a separate story, the NY Fishwrap reports that the number of major leaguer players using Ritalin for attention deficit disorder has skyrocketed. Major league ballparks have become needle parks and the players are using anything to get an edge on the fear of failure. When The Dubster mentioned steroids in his 2004 State of the Union address years before the drug problem in baseball emerged on the national radar, the talking heads found the the mention of steroids puzzling. It would seem that the former managing partner (W hisself) in the Texas Rangers baseball operation was engaged in the game of CYA because the Rangers clubhouse was a needle park filled with performance-enhancing drug users. This scandal reeks of "don't ask, don't tell" when it came to players whose physiques ballooned with drug use. The Dubster was no different than his brethren who owned the St. Louis Cardinals (Mark McGuire) or the San Francisco Giants (Barry Bonds) because the Texas Rangers had their own 'roid-users (Jose Canseco and Rafael Palmeiro and others). If this is a (fair & balanced) gluteal injection, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
In Baseball, Fear Bats at the Top of the Order
By Doug Glanville

He will always be a rookie to me, but Jimmy Rollins, the reigning National League most valuable player, once gave me a poignant piece of wisdom that typically would flow from mentor to mentee, not the other way around. “Do it afraid,” was his advice — and it’s a lesson Major League Baseball had best learn if it is to put the age of steroids behind it.

A healthy amount of fear can lead to great results, to people pushing themselves to the brink of their capabilities. I can recall an opening day when I was a Chicago Cub getting set to face the Florida Marlins and hearing Mark Grace explain to the young players how he still got butterflies even after all his years in the majors.

Yes, baseball players are afraid. Not just on opening day and not just because of the 400-page Mitchell report and not just because of a Congressional hearing on performance-enhancing drugs in baseball — like the one that took place Tuesday — but because they always have been afraid. A player’s career is always a blink in a stare. I retired at the ripe old age of 34 following a season of sunflower seeds and only 162 at-bats. I had been a starter the year before. In this game, change happens fast.

Human nature wants to put the brakes on that rate of change. While your clock is ticking, faster, stronger and younger players are setting up their lockers next to yours. They usually have better sound bites and lower salaries, too. In 1998, I was the new kid in Philadelphia, battling Lenny Dysktra for the center field job. Five years later, I was mentoring another new kid, Marlon Byrd, so he could replace me. Faced with that rate of career atrophy, players are capable of rash, self-serving and often irresponsible decisions. Enter steroids.

There is a tipping point in a player’s career where he goes from chasing the dream to running from a nightmare. At that point, ambition is replaced with anxiety, passion is replaced with survival. It is a downhill run and it spares no one.

For me, it started with a pop in 2003, while I was running out a routine ground ball in Texas. A torn tendon, two months of rehab, a Triple-A stint and 30 days of playing with a limp left me spending more time getting ready for the game than actually playing, and that changed my priorities, forever.

It was my first trip to the disabled list. I realized I couldn’t just roll out of bed and play anymore. All of a sudden, I felt old. It was the moment when a player is faced with the choice between aging naturally or aging artificially. I chose door number one, and two years later it was Triple-A or bust. Those who chose door number two ... well, you know the rest.

To explain the ice water in his veins, Michael Jordan once declared, “fear is an illusion.” But I think fear is real and every bit as much a part of baseball as popcorn and peanuts. I remember learning on my first trip to Dodger Stadium that “no one wants to strike out here because it is a long walk to the dugout.”

The newest round of Congressional hearings danced around Miguel Tejada, the remorse of baseball leadership and a lot of could haves, should haves, and might haves. Moving forward, we must openly address not only the drug issues plaguing the sports we love, but the culture of fear that shakes our society.

We’re scared of failure, aging, vulnerability, leaving too soon, being passed up — and in the quest to conquer these fears, we are inspired by those who do whatever it takes to rise above and beat these odds. We call it “drive” or “ambition,” but when doing “whatever it takes” leads us down the wrong road, it can erode our humanity. The game ends up playing us.

So let the rookie teach us all something important. Just do it, but do it ... afraid.

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

Proper Name: Douglas Metunwa Glanville
Born: August 25, 1970 — Hackensack, NJ
Height: 6-2
Weight: 174 lbs.
Age: 37
Bats: Right
Throws: Right
Pos: CF
Experience: 9 years
College: Pennsylvania

[Douglas Metunwa Glanville is a former Major League Baseball outfielder who played for the Philadelphia Phillies, Texas Rangers, and the Chicago Cubs.

In 2005, with no immediate prospects of joining a major league roster, Glanville signed a one-day minor league contract with Philadelphia, then retired, having collected exactly 1100 career hits. He stated he wanted to leave baseball wearing the uniform of the team that he grew up a fan of, and to which he gave most of his playing career.

Glanville flashed a bat in 1999 as he batted .325, and placed second in the league to Luis Gonzalez in hits, with 204, never to hit that well again. But he's always been known for his defense as one of the best outfielders in the National League.

Glanville attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in systems engineering. He is one of only five Penn alumni to play in Major League Baseball since 1951.]

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Change This!

A lot of loose change (Whatever that means.) is circulating during this political season. Matt Davies won the Pulitzer Prize for his political cartoons in 2004. Thomas Nast would be proud. If this is (fair & balanced) cartoonery, so be it.

[x The (White Plains, NY) Journal News]

Click on image to enlarge.
[Matt Davies is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for The Journal News. Born in London, he emigrated to the United States in 1983 and pursued his love of drawing, writing and making fun of people in positions of power throughout his educational career, while fitting in schoolwork in his spare time.]

Copyright © 2008 Matt Davies

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Who Was That Masked Man?

When I hear Rossini's "William Tell Overture," I always remember listening to the radio and the hearty cry of "Hi, Ho, Silver! Away!" I am transported to the thrilling days of yesteryear. In my time at the Collegium Excellens, when the conversation turned to James Fenimore Cooper and the Leatherstocking Tales, I always linked Hawkeye to the Lone Ranger. The archetype of the mysterious stranger who appears without fanfare and rides away without waiting for the thanks of the grateful folk saved from death and destruction. "Who was that masked man?" "Why, don't you know?" "Shane, come back, Shane!" And the cry echoes in my mind to this day. If this is (fair & balanced) hero worship, so be it.

[x NPR's "All Things Considered," January 14, 2008]

Click on image to enlarge.



















Earl Grasser, in the studio but masked anyway, portraying the Lone Ranger on the original WXYZ radio show on January 1, 1937. [Copyright © 2008 Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images]

In 1874, six Texas Rangers were betrayed by a guide and ambushed at Bryant's Gap. Riding on a canyon floor, they came under rifle fire from a gang of outlaws on the cliffs above.

Five died; the sixth was left for dead and would have died that day but for an amazing coincidence: After the shooting was over, an Indian man happened upon the scene of the ambush. The ranger, who was wounded but still clinging to life, had saved that Indian from outlaw raiders a few years earlier, when the two were just boys.

The Indian recognized his boyhood companion, carried him to a nearby cave and nursed him back to health. Four days later, the surviving Ranger came to. And he asked his savior what had happened to his comrades.

The Indian showed him the graves of the other five Rangers — and did the subtraction. "You only Ranger left," Tonto said. "You Lone Ranger."

And he's been the Lone Ranger ever since — on radio, in movies, in novels, on television, in comic books.

His story is absolutely fictitious. Basic facts — names, dates, places — have all been adjusted and retrofitted over the 75 years since he first hit the airwaves.

But some things are always the same: He's always on horseback. He always wears a mask. He always pursues justice. And he never accepts praise or payment.

In 1933, Fran Striker, a self-described hack writer, was in Buffalo, N.Y., writing radio scripts for, among other stations, WXYZ in Detroit.

Fran Striker created The Lone Ranger for WXYZ radio in Detroit. [Courtesy the Museum of Broadcast Communications. Collection of Fran Striker, Jr.]

"They were buying five programs a week from him," says the late writer's son, Fran Striker Jr. "Some of them were mystery series. Some of them were Secret Service series."

And the owner of WXYZ, George Trendle, wanted a Western.

Striker started writing. And over the course of a dozen episodes, a character took shape: an expert rider, a marksman who never shot to kill, a paragon of virtue.

Gary Hoppenstand, an American Studies professor and editor of the scholarly Journal of Popular Culture, ranks the Lone Ranger among a handful of important iconic figures in American popular culture. He's a vigilante lawman who protects the criminal justice system by working outside it — a hero made for radio audiences of the Great Depression.

"In the 1930s, the perception was that there was a failure of capitalism," Hoppenstand explains. "There was a failure of government to protect the American people from ... what was, up to that point, was one of the worst financial experiences of American history."

A masked vigilante who operated outside the bounds of government — but in the interests of the law-abiding public — resonated with that public. And he was "wonderful escapist enjoyment, as well," Hoppenstand says.

For the first 10 episodes of The Lone Ranger, the Ranger actually rode alone. (This was before they cooked up the backstory of the ambush at Bryant's Gap.) As writer Fran Striker told his son, Fran Junior, that posed a problem for creating dialogue.

"The Lone Ranger had nobody to talk to if he was a lone ranger," Striker says. "So it was suggested they create a sidekick for TLR. Script 11 introduced Tonto. And [he] was developed solely for the purpose of giving the Lone Ranger someone to talk to."

"I always looked at the Lone Ranger as like your idealized White Man and Tonto as the idealized Native American," says Mark Ellis, a writer and Lone Ranger fan who compiled a fictional timeline of the hero's life. "As a kid growing up, my idea of a Native American was based on, basically, Tonto, who was a good person. He was very moral. He was very smart, even if he spoke rather broken English."

"If the Lone Ranger accepts the Indian as his closest companion, it's obvious to the child listener that great men have no racial or religious prejudice," Fran Striker Jr. says. He says that in all the Lone Ranger episodes, there is never a disparaging word about any minority group.

Of course, what had sufficed as racial equality in 1933 could easily provoke cynicism by the time the show was on television in the 1950s and 60s.

"Bill Cosby used to do a routine where he could never understand why the Lone Ranger would always send Tonto into town for supplies, and then he would get beaten up," Mark Ellis remembers.

In a contemporary graphic-novel treatment of the old story, Tonto acquires grammar. It's a darker version of the tale, a revenge story. But the familiar hallmarks are there. Including the mask.

Why the mask? Well, the idea was that the Butch Cavendish Gang — the bad guys who had killed his comrades in that ambush — should not know that one of them survived, and was out to seek revenge.

"And the mask, so the legend goes, was cut from his dead brother's vest," says Terry Salomonson, lifelong fan and collector of Lone Ranger memorabilia.

But why did he always wear the mask? Even when he and Tonto were riding alone across the Texas wilderness?

"Overcaution," Salomonson jokes.

The mask, pop-culture professor Gary Hoppenstander points out, is "the very symbol of the outlaws" the Lone Ranger combats. But it's more than that.

"I think what it plays into is the audience's sense of escapist fantasy," Hoppenstander says. "The idea is that in their imagination, in their dreams, all they need to do is don their own mask, and they, too could have these grand and exciting adventures."

So who actually knew the face of the Lone Ranger? His nephew did. Tonto did, of course. And, as Salmanson recalls, President Ulysses S. Grant did. The two had a meeting at a railroad siding in St. Louis, as part of a 64-episode series about something called the Legion of the Black Arrow — "a particular group of individuals that were trying to carve out their country, so to speak, in the West," Salmanson says.

Grant, being the president, wouldn't talk to a masked man. The Lone Ranger, being a patriot, broke his rule just that once.

Something else about the Lone Ranger: He rode a while stallion named Silver. And his six-shooter fired silver bullets. Writer Mark Ellis says these accessories were designed to be indelible in the mind's eye.

"The silver bullets, the mask and the white stallion, Silver — those were what was known, I guess, in the old days of radio as 'shiny things for the mind,' so that the imagination could latch on and make it easier to visualize the characters and the places," Ellis says.

And people did. Time was, kids had Lone Ranger rings, hats, masks, Lone Ranger giveaways from cereal boxes. Novelist Michael Chabon says the charm still works for some kids today.

"My 4-year-old and I just stumbled upon some books we have, these Golden Books from the 1950s," Chabon says. "And my son was immediately rapt.

"There's something about the mask and the hat and the horse and the silver bullets and the faithful Indian friend and — I don't know what it is, but my son immediately demanded that we attire him in a blue denim shirt and blue jeans, and we found an old plastic mask and put it on him."

The Lone Ranger — in character for 75 years, and still going.

Click on image to enlarge.


















Actor Clayton Moore — TV's Lone Ranger — rides to the rescue circa 1955. [Copyright © 2008 Hulton Archive/Getty Images]

The Lone Ranger Creed
by Fran Striker

"I believe that to have a friend,
a man must be one.

That all men are created equal
and that everyone has within himself
the power to make this a better world.

That God put the firewood there
but that every man
must gather and light it himself.

In being prepared
physically, mentally, and morally
to fight when necessary
for that which is right.

That a man should make the most
of what equipment he has.

That 'This government,
of the people, by the people
and for the people'
shall live always.

That men should live by
the rule of what is best
for the greatest number.

That sooner or later...
somewhere...somehow...
we must settle with the world
and make payment for what we have taken.

That all things change but truth,
and that truth alone, lives on forever.

In my Creator, my country, my fellow man."

[Gary Hoppenstand is a Professor of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University. Mark Ellis is an American novelist whose freelance feature work has appeared in dozens of publications over the years, ranging from comics to sports to popular culture. Terry Salomonson was asked, in 1983, by Fran Striker, Jr. to participate in the family's 50th anniversary celebration of "The Lone Ranger" on radio.]

Copyright © 2008 NPR

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