In Other News…

Lewis H. Lapham, the Editor in Chief of one of America’s smartest, most engaging monthlies, thoroughly explicates in his July editorial the futility of blaming George W. Bush for everything. Mr. Bush is, of course, doing his level best to do what he’s been told to do –project for the country, and the world, the “powers of the American imagination [and] the strength of the American spirit.”

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Contempt of a Nation

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Judith Miller left a Federal Courthouse today in handcuffs, bound for a stint in a minimum security institution for the crime of contempt of court. Weeks ago, she’d been ordered to testify before a Grand Jury investigating the Summer of ’03’s outing of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame by anonymous officials of the Bush administration, and was finally jailed for refusing to identify her confidential sources in a story she never even wrote about.

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It’s Showtime Now

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor resigned today after 24 years of service adjudicating the Law of the Land for the United States Supreme Court. Appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981, she cast the deciding vote in 13 of 15 decisions handed down by 5-4 majorities during her term, and is seen by many to have been the crucial centerweight between the uber-reactionary Scalia/Thomas wing of the court, and the activist, secular liberalism of John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

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Let’s Do The Time Warp Again

These days, the President reminds me of nothing so much as one of those pre-historic wasps, trapped in a solid block of crystalline amber. Perhaps the image is more akin to a hapless sauropod, flailing about helplessly in what a five year-old would call “the hot lava,” at the dawn of time.

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Change Gonna Come

If you’ve ever followed the stock or commodity markets, or read the classic treatise Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, you know at significant turns in the cycles of events which characterize human existence, things get pretty wild.

Prices gyrate, structures crumble, rules and traditions are broken or ignored, and, often enough, people die.

I believe we may be approaching just such a turn in the cycles. It’s just too wild out there to believe things can keep going the way they are.

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Mixed Messages

George W. Bush’s Snake Oil & Medicine Show rolled into my hometown of Memphis, TN on Friday, where the affable, self-styled champion of the Wondrous and Amazing Effects of Freedom and Democracy did his best to scare the bejeezus out of a hand-picked crowd of True Believers.

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