Obama's Afghanistan-Pakistan Folly

William Pfaff

Paris, October 7, 2008 – There are only two real issues left in the foreign policy argument between John McCain and Barack Obama. One is how soon to withdraw from Iraq; and the second, what to do about what Obama thinks is the "real" war America should be fighting, in Afghanistan.

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Note:  The following was written without ( Read more... )

Lipstick on a Pig

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/polls/slansky2008campaignquiz/01013sh_shouts_slansky

James Carroll: Making sense of $700 billion

By James Carroll

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/06/opinion/edcarroll.php

How much is 700 billion? The mind registers the number with such imprecision as to make it meaningless. One blogger proposed this way of grasping the figure: As a stack of $100 bills, it would reach 54 miles high. But who can imagine that? On the other hand, someone at the Smithsonian once calculated that counting to one billion, at the rate of one digit per second, would take 30 years. By that scale, counting to 700 billion would take 21,000 years.

Come again? That stretch of time takes us back to the cave painters of Lascaux, the glacial age, the last Neanderthals. The mind is not helped.

http://www.planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/news/story.aspx?id=194

Chris M

Editorial

Coal and votes

Unfortunately for Barack Obama and John McCain, there is no such thing as "clean coal." The phrase is an Orwellian marketing slogan invented by coal interests, yet both presidential campaigns are eagerly embracing it. This raises a serious contradiction: You can't claim to be interested in fighting global warming or pollution, as both men do, while backing a filthy fossil fuel like coal.

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Jacqueline Duda didn't realize how challenging it can be to get treatment for drug addiction until her own daughter needed help. In  today's Health section, Duda describes the unsuccessful journey taken by her and her family to save Nicole Duda's life. She will be joined by Michael Gimbel, an addiction specialist and the former director of substance abuse education and prevention at Baltimore's Sheppard Pratt Health System. They will be online Tuesday, Oct. 7 at noon ET to discuss Duda's story and the importance of expanding the options for treating addiction.

____________________

Tuesday, October 7, 2008; HE05

Some resources:

· National Institute on Drug Abuse provides fact sheets on addiction and treatment, offers physician and treatment locators, and includes public policy and legislative news.

· Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration offers extensive medical and legislative information on addiction and treatment services.

· Join Together is a nonprofit group providing drug addiction treatment and research information. Sign up for e-mail alerts regarding clinical trials and legislative news.

· American Society of Addiction Medicine provides information on addiction for physicians and the public as well as online search tools for finding an addiction specialist provider.

· American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry. International professional membership organization of psychiatrists provides online search tools for finding an addiction specialist provider.

· National Council on Alcohol and Drug Dependence, Maryland Chapter raises awareness about alcoholism and drug dependence in Maryland and offers resources for families searching for addiction treatment and research.

· Treatment Research Institute is a nonprofit organization assembling a comprehensive guide for families on addiction treatment and resources, focusing on evidence-based program information.

· Heroin Action Coalition Nonprofit is an outreach program for families and friends dealing with heroin addiction and other substance-use disorders. Twenty-four-hour phone hotline and links to treatment center information.

· Mike Gimbel Associates, a national substance abuse education and consultant service based in Towson, recently started TRIAGE, a treatment, referral, information and guidance education service that helps families learn to move through the addiction treatment system faster.

-- Jacqueline M. Duda

• Where to Get Help: Where to Get Help
• October 7, 2008 12:00 p.m.: Dealing With Addiction

By Jacqueline M. Duda
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, October 7, 2008; HE01

We're a hardy family, used to weathering all manner of surprises as we've seen four kids through various stages of toddlerhood, childhood and adolescence. So when our fun-loving 22-year-old, Nicole, shocked us by admitting a heroin addiction and asked for our help in overcoming it, my husband and I froze only an instant. Then we leapt into action, firmly believing that with the aid of 21st-century medical treatment, we could help her reclaim her life.

Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill

Jonathan Raban

Sarah Palin has put a new face and voice to the long-standing, powerful, but inchoate movement in US political life that one might see as a mutant variety of Poujadism, inflected with a modern American accent. There are echoes of the Poujadist agenda of 1950s France in its contempt for metropolitan elites, fuelling the resentment of the provinces towards the capital and the countryside towards the city, in its xenophobic strain of nationalism, sturdy, paysan resistance to taxation, hostility to big business, and conviction that politicians are out to exploit the common man. In 1980, Ronald Reagan profitably tapped the movement with his promises of states’ rights, low taxes and a shrunken government in Washington; the ‘Reagan Democrats’ who crossed party lines to vote for him are still the most targeted demographic in the country. In 1992, Ross ‘Clean out the Barn’ Perot and his United We Stand America followers looked for a while as if they were going to up-end the two-party system, with Perot leading George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the midsummer polls. In 1996, Pat Buchanan (‘The peasants are coming with pitchforks’) appealed to the same bloc of voters with a programme that was militantly Christian, white, nativist, provincial, protectionist and anti-Washington. In 2000, Karl Rove cleverly enrolled this quasi-Poujadist faction in his grand alliance of libertarians, born-agains and corporate interests. It’s worth remembering that in 2004 every American city with a population of more than 500,000 voted for Kerry, and that the election was won for Bush in the outer suburbs, exurbia and the countryside – peasants with pitchforks territory. For an organisation so wedded to its big-city corporate clients, the Republican Party has been hugely successful in mopping up the votes of low-income, lightly educated rural and exurban residents.

Pitbull Palin Mauls McCain

SARAH PALIN’S post-Couric/Fey comeback at last week’s vice presidential debate was a turning point in the campaign. But if she “won,” as her indulgent partisans and press claque would have it, the loser was not Joe Biden. It was her running mate. With a month to go, the 2008 election is now an Obama-Palin race — about “the future,” as Palin kept saying Thursday night — and the only person who doesn’t seem to know it is Mr. Past, poor old John McCain.

To understand the meaning of Palin’s “victory,” it must be seen in the context of two ominous developments that directly preceded it. Just hours before the debate began, the McCain campaign pulled out of Michigan. That state is ground zero for the collapsed Main Street economy and for so-called Reagan Democrats, those white working-class voters who keep being told by the right that Barack Obama is a Muslim who hung with bomb-throwing radicals during his childhood in the late 1960s.

McCain surrendered Michigan despite having outspent his opponent on television advertising and despite Obama’s twin local handicaps, an unpopular Democratic governor and a felonious, now former, black Democratic Detroit mayor. If McCain can’t make it there, can he make it anywhere in the Rust Belt?

Robert Fisk: When it comes to Palestine and Israel, the US simply doesn't get it

Biden and Palin hid like rabbits from the centre of the Middle East earthquake

Independent, Saturday, 4 October 2008

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisks-world-when-it-comes-to-palestine-and-israel-the-us-simply-doesnt-get-it-950812.html

Palestinians ceased to exist in the United States on Thursday night. Both Joe Biden and Sarah Palin managed to avoid the use of that poisonous word. "Palestine" and "Palestinians" – that most cancerous, slippery, dangerous concept – simply did not exist in the vice-presidential debate. The phrase "Israeli occupation" was mercifully left unused. Neither the words "Jewish colony" nor "Jewish settlement" – not even that cowardly old get-out clause of American journalism, "Jewish neighbourhood" – got a look-in. Nope.

Those bold contenders of the US vice-presidency, so keen to prove their mettle when it comes to "defence", hid like rabbits from the epicentre of the Middle East earthquake: the existence of a Palestinian people. Sure, there was talk of a "two-state" solution, but it would have mystified anyone who didn't understand the region.

There was even a Biden jibe at George Bush for pressing on with "elections" – again, the adjective "Palestinian" went missing – that produced a Hamas victory. But Hamas appeared to exist in never-never land, a vast landscape that gradually encompassed all the vast and black deserts that stretch, in the imagination of US politicians, from the Mediterranean to Pakistan.

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This is a 9-plus page trenchant article in the London Review of Books on Sara Palin.  It is a worthy read.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n19/print/raba01_.html
 
Regards,  John