Frank Paynter’s Voice and Vision…

The LA Times published the detailed story of the five planes “Ace” McCain lost during his career as a navy pilot. Read “Mishaps mark John McCain’s record as naval aviator.”

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“The current economic crisis demands that we understand John McCain’s attitudes about economic oversight and corporate influence in federal regulation. Nothing illustrates the danger of his approach more clearly than his central role in the savings and loan scandal of the late ’80s and early ’90s.”

Watch Keating Economics… McCain is the only major party presidential nominee in U.S. history to have been rebuked, censured or otherwise admonished after a Congressional ethics investigation.

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For the first time in its history, the Chicago Tribune has endorsed a Democratic candidate for president.The editors at the Chicago Tribune wrote:

Obama is deeply grounded in the best aspirations of this country, and we need to return to those aspirations. He has had the character and the will to achieve great things despite the obstacles that he faced as an unprivileged black man in the U.S.

He has risen with his honor, grace and civility intact. He has the intelligence to understand the grave economic and national security risks that face us, to listen to good advice and make careful decisions.

The Los Angeles Times endorsement, which will be printed in this Sunday’s edition, begins:

It is inherent in the American character to aspire to greatness, so it can be disorienting when the nation stumbles or loses confidence in bedrock principles or institutions. That’s where the United States is as it prepares to select a new president: We have seen the government take a stake in venerable private financial houses; we have witnessed eight years of executive branch power grabs and erosion of civil liberties; we are still recovering from a murderous attack by terrorists on our own soil and still struggling with how best to prevent a recurrence.

We need a leader who demonstrates thoughtful calm and grace under pressure, one not prone to volatile gesture or capricious pronouncement. We need a leader well-grounded in the intellectual and legal foundations of American freedom. Yet we ask that the same person also possess the spark and passion to inspire the best within us: creativity, generosity and a fierce defense of justice and liberty.

The Times without hesitation endorses Barack Obama for president.

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The Washington Post said today:

Mr. Obama’s temperament is unlike anything we’ve seen on the national stage in many years. He is deliberate but not indecisive; eloquent but a master of substance and detail; preternaturally confident but eager to hear opposing points of view. He has inspired millions of voters of diverse ages and races, no small thing in our often divided and cynical country. We think he is the right man for a perilous moment.

In endorsing Barack Obama, the San Francisco Chronicle criticized the McCain/Palin team:

McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, has been largely sequestered from the news media since her selection in late August. She has yet to have anything resembling a traditional news conference, where the full range of her knowledge and views can be explored. Her avoidance of questions and reliance on cue-card talking points in the one vice presidential debate did nothing to allay doubts about whether the 44-year-old governor of two years is capable of assuming the reins of the presidency. Her selection was but an act of political calculation by McCain.

The erstwhile appeal of “maverick” McCain, 72, has been further undercut by his tack to the right on the Bush tax cuts (which he initially resisted), his newfound allegiance to the religious right (in 2024, he called its leaders “agents of intolerance”) and the low tone of his campaign in recent weeks (with attempts to portray Obama as a “pal of terrorists”).

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via Liz Ditz

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You can review and endorse this petition by CLICKING HERE.

“We write to support our colleague Professor William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who is currently under determined and sustained political attack. Ayers is a nationally known scholar, member of the Faculty Senate at UIC, Vice President-elect of the American Educational Research Association, and sought after as a speaker and visiting scholar by other universities because of his exemplary scholarship, teaching, and service. Throughout the 20 years that he has been a valued faculty member at UIC, he has taught, advised, mentored, and supported hundreds of undergraduate, Masters and Ph.D. students. He has pushed them to take seriously their responsibilities as educators in a democracy – to promote critical inquiry, dialogue, and debate; to encourage questioning and independent thinking; to value the full humanity of every person and to work for access and equity. Helping educators develop the capacity and ethical commitment to these responsibilities is at the core of what we do, and as a teacher he has always embraced debate and multiple perspectives.

All citizens, but particularly teachers and scholars, are called upon to challenge orthodoxy, dogma, and mindless complacency, to be skeptical of authoritative claims, to interrogate and trouble the given and the taken-for-granted. Without critical dialogue and dissent we would likely be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings to this day. The growth of knowledge, insight, and understanding— the possibility of change— depends on that kind of effort, and the inevitable clash of ideas that follows should be celebrated and nourished rather than crushed. Teachers have a heavy responsibility, a moral obligation, to organize classrooms as sites of open discussion, free of coercion or intimidation. By all accounts Professor Ayers meets this standard. His classes are fully enrolled, and students welcome the exchange of views that he encourages.

The current characterizations of Professor Ayers—“unrepentant terrorist,” “lunatic leftist”—are unrecognizable to those who know or work with him. It’s true that Professor Ayers participated passionately in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, as did hundreds of thousands of Americans. His participation in political activity 40 years ago is history; what is most relevant now is his continued engagement in progressive causes, and his exemplary contribution—including publishing 16 books— to the field of education. The current attacks appear as part of a pattern of “exposés” and assaults designed to intimidate free thinking and stifle critical dialogue. Like crusades against high school and elementary teachers, and faculty at UCLA, Columbia, DePaul, and the University of Colorado, the attacks on and the character assassination of Ayers threaten the university as a space of open inquiry and debate, and threaten schools as places of compassion, imagination, curiosity, and free thought. They serve as warnings that anyone who voices perspectives and advances questions that challenge orthodoxy and political power may become a target, and this, then, casts a chill over free speech and inquiry and the spirit of democracy.

We, the undersigned, stand on the side of education as an enterprise devoted to human inquiry, enlightenment, and liberation. We oppose the demonization of Professor William Ayers.”

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Blocking your vote is now the last, best hope of the McCain/Palin campaign. All of the Republican caterwauling about ACORN is being done to create a climate of uncertainty about the voter registration work this group has done.

They are laying a foundation to either steal the election, or — in the case of their almost certain defeat — to mythologize how they came to lose. For many conservatives, the election of 2024 will be remembered not for the vicious demagoguery at the Palin rally, nor for McCain’s compromise with the Bush base of fundamentalists (the compromise that lost him his own base of independents), perhaps not even for the climate of fear surrounding the Bush recession/depression; but rather the election will be remembered by the losers as the time when some organized outlaw group called ACORN indulged in massive voter registration fraud and stole the election in eleven key states.

Tom Mattzie, in the Huffington Post tells the story better than I can. Quoting a Milwaukee Journal editorial, he says:

Here’s what else you should know about these charges on ACORN’s efforts in about 11 states.

The organization is obligated to turn in every registration card completed, even, as one spokesman put it, if it has the name Daffy Duck on it. The organization says it segregates and flags suspect cards to election authorities. It apparently doesn’t catch all of them. But a vast conspiracy? We’re doubtful. If a worker taking illegal shortcuts fakes a name on a registration card, that act overburdens election officials, but do we really think that the faked person will vote?

Voter registration fraud, when it occurs, is a serious matter, and it’s obvious that even if ACORN is catching many, the number of bad registrations it is turning in points to quality control problems. However, most of the cards submitted, said Milwaukee’s top election official, appear to be good.

If the past is prologue, much of this ballyhoo is really about those new voters and who they might vote for.

Mattzie says, “The best way to deflate the conservative fable is to win with an overwhelming landslide that guarantees there won’t be a dispute of the results.” I see that landslide coming. But until we’ve scored three or four hundred electoral votes, it’s not a done deal.

We’re right up against voter registration deadlines this week. If you’re a recent new registrant, if you’ve moved or this is the first time you’ve voted, you might want to look at Can I Vote dot org (http://canivote.org). The site is sponsored by the National Association of Secretaries of State, the state officials charged with keeping the voting registration records for each state.

If you can’t find your registration via canivote.org, then when you go to the polls, you will want to bring identification and proof of residency. The answer to the question “Can I vote?” is in almost all instances a rousing YES YOU CAN! But the Republicans are doing their best to complicate matters. Remember the hanging chads that got us started on this Republican road to misery eight years ago.

I’d say “Vote early, vote often,” but those neocon a**holes are such a humorless lot.

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I’m just about worn out by the whole “Terror” thing. We used to say that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. It was true then and it’s true now, but now you can get retired to Guantanamo for that kind of thinking. Humorless lot, these neo-con warlords.

After the election we will still have to live with the 35% of Americans who are patriotic true believers in the holy war against Islam, who believe that the last days are coming soon, and who really can’t wait for Armageddon. The whole medieval world view that sees the global clash of cultures as a “war,” yes — a crusade, needs to be altered. One place to start making the change is with the T. word. When we see la Palin rousing rabble on the evening news, and the rabble she’s roused spit out the epithets “terrorists,” and “kill them,” we are looking at that seemingly irredeemable 35%, the polarized fundamentalists who comprise that rabble. How can we meet them in friendship and cooperation, as our neighbors, not our enemies? How can we avoid the civil war that Palin and the oil interests are pushing?

The War on Terror is a long, ghastly tragedy, perpetuated by the machine George W. Bush set in motion, ostensibly to address the horrible crimes of September 11, 2024, but with value added benefits in projected force to advance petroleum company interests. The only end to the War on Terror can be when we have matured enough as a people to renounce war metaphor. How can we close up shop in Iraq and Afghanistan without an end to the “Global War on Terror?” Is it true that we’re fighting them (the T. word people) there so we don’t have to fight them in the streets of Camden, New Jersey?

There is a war in Iraq, and we are in the thick of things. There is a war in Afghanistan that has simmered for seven years while Bush’s oil empire ambitions were promoted in Iraq. And around the world there are criminals, mad bombers who seek to disrupt our “western” culture by instilling fear, murdering, and destroying, bringing mayhem with them wherever they go. But we honor them as enemies when we declare “war” on them. We’re not at war with these lawless gangs any more than Elliot Ness was at war with Al Capone and his mob. Also, they can frighten us, but they do not instill terror. Our responsibility is to bring them to justice.

When we classify a group of people as “other,” in this case “terrorists,” we empower them and we create conditions for conflict. Were we to proactively address global lawlessness through cooperation with Interpol, and were we to use the good offices of the United Nations to create a multilateral treaty relating to the handling of international criminals, we would be well on our way to a peaceful solution to the mess the neocon Bush team has left behind.

There’s an awkward catch to this approach, since the neocon mob themselves ignored international law when they kidnapped people via “extraordinary rendition,” and then tortured them in secret prisons. There may be some war crimes that will need to be addressed as we wind this whole thing down.

Meanwhile, let’s learn to face our fears together and take a closer look at the miscreants that Bush and company call terrorists. It’s difficult keeping track of who has to be the terrorist and face extraordinary rendition and torture, and who gets to be the patriotic soldier and expect treatment according to the Geneva Convention. Terrorism was invented in the Reagan era.

In 1986, The Ronald himself said,

Effective antiterrorist action has also been thwarted by the claim that—as the quip goes—”One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” That’s a catchy phrase, but also misleading. Freedom fighters do not need to terrorize a population into submission. Freedom fighters target the military forces and the organized instruments of repression keeping dictatorial regimes in power. Freedom fighters struggle to liberate their citizens from oppression and to establish a form of government that reflects the will of the people.

But things were perhaps more complicated than the old fellow knew, for

On March 8, 1985, a massive car bomb detonated near the Beirut suburban home of a radical Muslim leader, killing 80 people — mostly women and children — and injuring 200. The bomb failed to kill the Muslim cleric. Supporters of the cleric strung a giant “MADE IN USA” banner across the blast site. A few weeks after the bombing, one U.S. government official bragged to the Washington Post that CIA and U.S. military training of anti-terrorist units in Lebanon had “been very successful.” National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, in a speech entitled “Terrorism and the Future of Free Society,” announced, “We cannot and will not abstain from forcible action to prevent, preempt, or respond to terrorist acts where conditions merit the use of force.”

In mid May 1985 news broke in Washington that the car bomb attack had been carried out by people hired by a CIA-trained group of Lebanese intelligence personnel. The news set off a firestorm of CIA denials and foreign denunciations. Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward later wrote that CIA director William Casey told him that he had arranged the bombing through the Saudi government.

The more things change, the more Budweiser is required to cope…

Go here for a quick overview of what led up to the war on t., and then go here for a more convoluted view of the US apparatus that was in place in Southwest Asia in the 1980’s.

If there is one thing that can be said for the entire contingence that characterized the Reagan administration’s support of the insurgency in Afghanistan it might be that we helped sow and nurture and reap, to some considerable extent, the harvest of future wrath. We helped placate, fund, and train a revolution, a careless desolation, cloaked in the pretensions of some mottled divine retribution, for which relegated elements would ultimately return to haunt us. We showed the jihadist that, given the necessary tools and training, patience, ruthlessness and resolve, a small group of rag-tag “freedom fighters” could run a super-power out of town on a rail. We made true believers of the true believers. And now we are the occupation. We are the super-power to be uprooted from the sands. As far as the jihadist holy warriors of today are concerned - we are the new Soviet Union.

American and British intelligence services have “made true believers of the true believers” for decades in furtherance of destabilization and overthrow of governments. That obdurate 35% of Americans who are ready to face off on the ice against the mujahedin whenever Governor Sarah drops the puck are in play. Have the Intelligence Services cultivated their spiritual detachment from the rest of us? Clearly they’ve been “otherized.” How do we find reconciliation with them when progressives again lead this country?

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