Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 2009
THOMAS JEFFERSON:
"ALL TYRANNY NEEDS TO GAIN A FOOTHOLD IS FOR PEOPLE OF GOOD CONSCIENCE TO REMAIN SILENT."
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN:
"ANY ONE WHO TRADES LIBERTY FOR SECURITY DESERVES NEITHER LIBERTY OR SECURITY."
THEODORE ROOSEVELT:
"A GREAT DEMOCRACY MUST BE PROGRESSIVE OR IT WILL SOON CEASE TO BE A GREAT DEMOCRACY."
WINSTON CHURCHILL:
"DEMOCRACY IS THE WORST FORM OF GOVERNMENT, EXCEPT FOR ALL THE OTHER FORMS THAT HAVE BEEN TRIED."
GEORGE CARLIN:
"I THINK THE HUMAN RACE HAS SQUANDERED ITS GIFT AND THIS COUNTRY HAS SQUANDERED ITS PROMISE. I THINK PEOPLE IN AMERICA SOLD OUT VERY CHEAPLY, FOR SNEAKERS AND CHEESE BURGERS. AND I DON'T THINK ITS FIXABLE."
HOWARD ZINN:
"DISSENT IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF PATRIOTISM."
Howard Zinn: American Empire Is 'Crumbling'
BART SIMPSON:
"THE CONSTITUTION? I'M PRETTY SURE THE PATRIOT ACT KILLED IT TO ENSURE OUR FREEDOMS."
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DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY - December 2009
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As Richard Hofstadter observed, it is the fate of the United States “not to have an ideology but to be one;” and so America in its lacerating imperfection must ever aim high.
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The state can detain and prosecute people not for what they have done, or even for what they are planning to do, but for holding religious or political beliefs that the state deems seditious.
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Americans have given up the rule of law that protected their liberty. The silence of law schools and bar associations indicates that the age of liberty has passed. In short, the American people support tyranny. And that's where they are headed.
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A psychologist asks: Have consumerism, suburbanization and a malevolent corporate-government partnership so beaten us down that we no longer have the will to save ourselves?
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Here are my picks for the top ten worst things about the wretched period, which will continue to follow us until citizens stand up to fix them.
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Department of Homeland Security improperly collected information about American citizens or lawful United States residents, documents show.
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Half-baked Homeland Security is spending millions to develop sensors capable of detecting a person's level of 'malintent' as a counterterrorism tool.
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Defense attorney: "Future prospective torturers can now draw comfort from this decision."
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It's getting harder and harder to exercise your legal rights if you aren't well to do. Where's the justice in that?
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DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY - November 2009
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A Justice Department subpoena requesting information on visitors to an independent news site is raising serious privacy concerns.
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The economic elite have launched an attack on the U.S. public and society is unraveling at an increased rate.
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The war on marijuana is insane; our officials keep sacrificing tax dollars, lives, civil liberties, and their own credibility in this misguided and losing effort.
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Three contentious provisions are scheduled to expire next month; opponents of these sections have been pushing to roll them back. But Obama seems ready to renew them.
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DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY - October 2009
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"In Iran, demonstrators were lauded for using it." "Now that it is being used here for identical purposes it is being criminalized."
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Today we have a kind of highly-evolved dictatorship concealing itself as a functioning democracy.
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The U.S. Army's brief, illegal occupation of a string of towns in Alabama this past spring no longer looks like a freak one-off, but rather a logical progression in the ongoing billionaire plunder of America.
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“We don’t want to live in an environment where people in the United States think the government is spying on them. That’s an oppressive environment to live in and we don’t want to live that way.”
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They didn't want to commit outright physical torture … so they went to psychologists and lawyers and they tried to design a program which was, in their minds, legal. … They tried to make it legal and safe, but they just made it even more grotesque.
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A judge's recently-released opinion opens a window on Gitmo's harsh interrogation techniques, and the bad intel they yield.
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Listening in on attorney-client conversations is "unlawful and unconstitutional," according to Obama. So why is the Justice Department arguing in favor of the practice?
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The day of America's global pre-eminence is over. We must face the new global realities.
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The problem is that the things demanded by an empire, which is staying power, ruthlessness, the ability and the willingness to use its power around the world, it's something that democracies tend to be quite skeptical about.
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George HW Bush gets a free pass for attacks without evidence, meanwhile his CIA ties remain largely ignored and his son's lies about Iraq remain unprosecuted.
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But it is both unjust and disingenuous to focus on what our soldiers have become without talking about what we have become: A society that romanticizes its warriors, demonizes its veterans and devalues its women.
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DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY - September 2009
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Sonic weaponry is now being deployed domestically to put a chill on free speech. We’re told this is the "humane" way to deal with protesters, but it’s really just a convenient way to suppress citizens without having to explain bullet holes to reporters.
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In his new book, Daybreak, Swanson warns that Cheney radically transformed the role of the vice president into an unaccountable, dangerous seat of power.
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Cheney is all over the airwaves, trotting out his propaganda and defense of the Bush administration's serial violations of the Geneva conventions.
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The rise of extreme movements and authoritarianism can take root anywhere — even in a democracy.
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DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY - August 2009
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“It’s a crime story. But it’s also a war story about class warfare. And a vampire movie, with the upper 1 percent feeding off the rest of us. And, of course, it’s also a love story. Only it’s about an abusive relationship.”
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The real war is not between the left and the right. It is between the average American and the ruling class. It's time we took back our government from those who would make us their slaves.
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The free market's uncanny ability to enrich the elite, coupled with its inability to soften the sharp experiences of staggering poverty, has pushed inequality to the breaking point.
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The experience of the poor, and especially poor minorities, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks.
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Capitalism has raped the resources of the world. Now corporations are left to strip human experience from life, then rent it back to us.
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"Just like they did in Iraq, the Bush Administration manipulated intelligence to cause fear in the public to further its political goals."
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The working class faith in the promise of democratic self-government has been shattered through years of union-busting, farm foreclosures, factory exports, college grant cuts, subprime mortgage scams & all manner of betrayal, treachery, neglect & abuse.
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There are dangerous currents running through America's politics and the way we confront them is crucial.
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This article illustrates perfectly the article above: "Is the U.S. on the brink of fascism?"
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How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have "faith" - which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up.
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The insurance industry has agitated the far right to prevent health reform, but they don't know whom they're messing with.
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Why men of power and fame shake the rough, unmanicured hands of gun enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists, gay-haters, misogynists and racists.
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How ironic that the so-called freedom movement represented by Restore the Republic has placed itself in the service of the nation's corporations as it seeks to derail health-care reform.
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We're on a precarious road -- and wherever it leads, it's not toward democracy.
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Is this what Americans want their police to be doing: arresting enormous numbers of young people, disproportionately black and Latino, and destroying their futures, for … pot possession?
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Why? Because US has thwarted, not supported, democracy there.
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DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY - July 2009
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“This could be one of the key revelations of this era,” said Eileen Clancy, who has closely tracked government spying on activist organizations.
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Together, these 13 tyrants represent just 13 million people - or 4 percent of the total population. And they are obstructing a health care bill for the other 300 million of us.
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What is historically distinct about US power is that it has quite remarkably enabled the spread of human liberty and representative government, through time and across cultures.
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The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment will condemn the U.S. to a devastating trio of consequences.
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We can't just "move forward." We need to face who we've been and just how badly we've acted, if we care to become something better.
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Amin’s story of his incarceration offers another instructive chapter in the scandalous history of detainee treatment -- one that encompasses both physical torture and the more subtle moral quandary of leaving prisoners to languish indefinitely
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JFK was regarded as a virtual traitor by elements of the military-intelligence community. These were the forces that planned and carried out his assassination.
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There's something very fishy about the explanation being fed to the media.
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"The Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven't been called on it yet."
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"Freedom to do research and freedom of speech are core values of our democratic republic, and we have lost these freedoms. The future of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is in jeopardy.
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The Federal Reserve is the black hole of our democracy -- the crucial contradiction that keeps the people and their representatives from having any voice in these most important public policies. That's why the central bankers have always operated secretly
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DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY - June 2009
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“How can we speak of spreading democracy in Iraq while dismantling it here at home? Political dissent is fundamental to a free and democratic society. It should not be equated with crime.”
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What is reflected in this—the application of this statute & in Andrew’s conviction is a new attempt by the government, in a long history in this country of struggle over 1st Amendment rights, a new attempt by the government to suppress political dissent.
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The fundamental problem in the Middle East is not a degenerate and corrupt Islam. The fundamental problem is a degenerate and corrupt Christendom. We have not brought freedom & democracy & enlightenment to the Muslim world. We have brought the opposite.
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Why is corporate media so eager to cover the people's movement in Iran, but unwilling to cover the anti-war movement here?
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Apparently the fearmongering is working. "Coming up on eight years after Sept. 11, fear remains, and fear is politically potent," political scientist Paul Freedman of the University of Virginia
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DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY - May 2009
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Petraeus didn't say which parts of the Geneva Conventions he thought he and other administration officials had violated.
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The 'Black Shirts' of Guantanamo routinely terrorize prisoners, breaking bones, gouging eyes, squeezing testicles, and 'dousing' them with chemicals.
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As I wrote last year in my piece on sex crimes against detainees, "Sex Crimes in the White House," highly perverse, systematic sexual torture and sexual humiliation was, original documents reveal, directed from the top.
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The Bush administration's Torture 13. They authorized it, they decided how to implement it, and they crafted the legal fig leaf to justify it.
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Why do we leave it to children to demand the truth about torture and the rule of law?
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This isn't just about torture or a tangential debate about ticking nukes or "keeping us safe." It's apparent that torture was authorized for the purpose of fabricating a case for invading Iraq.
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Bush explained to French Pres. Chirac that the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Mid-East and must be defeated.
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Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear means that we will be willing to give up our rights and liberties for security.
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Turns out it is really the handiwork of a creepy FBI informant. The story strengthens the narrative that the "homeland" is under attack. It's not.
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A teenage girl is strip-searched and gets snickered at by old men in robes for challenging it -- what's so funny about the Fourth Amendment?
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DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY - APRIL 2009
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A half-dozen other precedents that dealt with torture were ignored because each of them contradicts the memo's conclusions and would have to be distinguished away. Professional rules would have required that these precedents be cited.
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If we are truly a nation of laws, committed to the decency and morality we embrace, we cannot let people who justify or commit torture and other war crimes to escape prosecution.
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The memo's gross distortion of psychological research makes it hard to imagine they were used in "good faith" as the Obama administration says.
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As you read them, keep in mind that the Obama administration has already announced that it will not seek charges against the people who carried out the actions they describe.
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Mayer was recently awarded the Ron Ridenhour Prize for her book "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals"
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It will shock many that nearly 4 1/2 years after the illegal program was uncovered, not only has the government continued to spy on Americans with total impunity, most of the details of Bush's warrantless wiretapping scheme remain a mystery
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In a legal filing on Friday, Obama lawyers claimed the government is shielded from lawsuits by a 'sovereign immunity' clause in the Patriot Act.
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"You, as commander in chief, are being denied access to material that would help prove that crimes have been committed by U.S. personnel. This decision is being made by the very people who you command."
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DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 2009 - MARCH
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A new report shows that in terms of aggregate health, education, purchasing power, security and general well-being, the U.S. has been in decline.
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Political operatives and ideological helpmates of George W. Bush broke the law to keep birth control away from women -- particularly teenagers.
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If you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron.
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Barring a socialist revolution that would in the end just rename the corrupt elites in charge, the best we can hope for is better-regulated capitalism to prevent the recurrence of the systematized robbery of the last thirty years.
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Investigative journalist Sy Hersh dropped a bombshell revelation on Monday about international killings ordered under Bush.
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The investigative journalist for The New Yorker explains his recent bombshell revelation about Dick Cheney's "executive assassination" squads.
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Sleep deprivation, extremes of temperature, noise, and beatings are some of the nastier methods the U.S. employed in the Bush era.
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Previously inaccessible memos written by Bush administration officials outlining their reasons for why the military had the right to warrantless wiretaps and warrantless search and seizures of people in the U.S. they deemed to be terrorist suspects.
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Legal expert Michael Ratner calls the legal arguments made in the infamous Yoo memos, "Fuhrer's law."
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The six targets named include former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, who could face "immediate arrest" upon entering Spain.
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DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 2009 - FEBRUARY
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Attorneys representing the Obama administration are defending one of the most controversial practices of the Bush administration.
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Instead of making a clean break with the dark policies of the Bush years, the Obama administration claimed the same “state secrets” privilege that Bush used to block inquiry into his policies of torture and illegal surveillance.
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Many undemocratic states have referred to U.S. counter-terrorism practices to justify their own abuses.
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America in the Bush years was so vicious and stupid that it managed to take my freedom of speech and turn it into someone else's living hell.
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Across the United States, tens of thousands of immigrants are being held in detention facilities that violate basic standards of humanity.
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The obvious irony is that we are not secure and free if government agents have a right to violate our privacy and deny our rights without cause.
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As the economic unraveling accelerates we will be told it is not the bearded Islamic extremists, but instead the domestic riffraff, environmentalists, anarchists, unions and enraged members of our dispossessed working class who threaten us.
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Today, falsified informant testimony accounts for nearly half of all wrongful convictions in capital cases nationwide, according to data from Northwestern University Law School's Center on Wrongful Convictions.
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More is at stake here than the health and well-being of [millions of] American children. … Something like the very honor of American democracy is involved.
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Governments that respond to a crisis created by free-market ideology with the same bad ideas will not survive to tell the tale.
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Failing to heed history and reality in Afghanistan, we may very well disappear into the superpower dustbin like Russia.
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DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 2009 - JANUARY
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If we are not practicing good science, we probably aren’t practicing good democracy. And vice versa.
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Every patriot should be concerned about the intensifying efforts to supplant democracy with something far more authoritarian: "American czarism."
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And here's the most incredible thing of all: 18 months into the most spectacular man-made financial calamity in modern experience, nothing has been done to change any of the bad incentives that led us here in the first place.
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Other countries are likely to take action against officials who condoned torture, even if the United States fails to do so.
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It is not enough merely to cease the abuses of power & criminality that marked the highest levels of Bush's administration. We cannot simply shrug off the constitutional & criminal misbehavior, treat it as an an aberration & hope it won't happen again.
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To the surprise of progressives and anger of the GOP, leading Dems support investigations.
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Do the one thing that will tell the world that we are a country of laws, & that will enable us to look forward without fear that we could once again face the trampling of the Constitution & the slide towards totalitarianism we've seen in the last 8 years.
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In an interview that aired on Fox News Sunday, Bush admitted that he personally authorized the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
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Buried in Appendix M of the Army Field Manual, the Guantanamo virus is spreading, and eradicating it will require all of us to spread the word.
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With the Army Field Manual likely to become the new standard for interrogation, the truth behind it is more crucial than ever.
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Bauer's fictional defense of torture and his fictional claims of its effectiveness are having very real consequences.
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E-mail messages that have gone suspiciously missing are estimated to number in the millions. These could illuminate some of the administration’s darker moments.
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Bush gave us the war in Iraq & Guantánamo & torture & rendition; he turned the Clinton economy & the budget surplus into fool’s gold; he dithered while New Orleans drowned; he trampled our civil liberties at home & ruined our reputation abroad.
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There is a long list of things Gonzales did wrong. But the underlying crime was against the principle that the U.S. is a country of laws, not men.
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Congressional leaders are advancing a radical view of international law that would allow powerful countries to get away with war crimes.
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Steps the incoming president can take to build a peace-based economy.
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Obama has made clear that he appreciates the role of checks and balances in our constitutional scheme. Now is the time to reverse the precipitous slide toward the imperial presidency.
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"You go over there and risk your life for America and your mind's all messed up, America should take care of you, right"
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