Irin Carmon: The Real Ann Romney!!

"I've always wished that Mitt could understand pregnancy, and a campaign is the closest thing to being pregnant," Ann Romney once said. "It has about a nine month life. It's very painful. It has a lot of ups and downs. At about nine months, you're saying to yourself, 'How can I get out of this?' But then, you know, it's over. The thing that's nice about pregnancy is that, in the end, you have a baby. It was 1994, and taking the metaphor to its logical conclusion, Mitt's first campaign for Senate in Boston was a stillbirth. Ann wouldn't tire of the pregnancy analogy, however, returning to it over the course of her husband's next three races, a win, a loss, one TBD, to explain why she was on-board after declaring "never again." "Mitt laughs. He says, 'You know what, Ann? You say that after every pregnancy, and we know how that worked out - we have five sons.' Yes, pregnancy is something Ann knows a lot about, more than Mitt could understand, as she put it, and she seems to see a similar immutable separateness when it comes to his chosen lot. Politics and public life are things she supports, even partners in, but are uncomplicatedly not her things. Each of their roles is clear and unquestioned: She is mother, wife and helpmate, and this grueling gestation process is simply the way to the role they both see for Mitt, which is to be a "great man". "I truly want Mitt to fulfill his destiny, and for that to happen, he's got to do politics," Ann told the Los Angeles Times on the eve of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. In his book "Turnaround," Mitt says he initially resisted the offer to take over the games until Ann changed his mind. "There's no one else who can do it," he remembers her saying.     

Joshua Holland: Is it Finally Time to Let the South Secede?

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that cultural friction between the North and South persists to this day. After all, we fought an incredibly brutal, ugly Civil War. The battle-lines that were drawn then, continued to divide us through the Reconstruction period and well into the middle of the 20th century, as federal troops were once again deployed to enforce the civil rights acts. According to Chuck Thompson, a veteran travel writer who toured the American South, a degree of mutual enmity between Northerners and Southerners continues to be a source of cultural tension and political gridlock. We remain divided, even as we have grown to become the world's superpower. In his new book, "Better Off Without 'Em: A Northern Manifesto For Southern Secession, Thompson argues that it may be time for a divorce, to shake hands and go our separate ways. Thompson appeared on last week's Alter Net Radio Hour to discuss his book. A lightly edited transcript of our discussion is below. Joshua Holland: Chuck, you seem to be channeling the frustration of a lot of Northern liberals. I may even have said myself that we should have let the Confederacy walk in 1860. But I haven't heard a lot of people calling to break up the Union today. You're known as a comedic travel writer. So my first question is to what degree are you being tongue in cheek here? To what degree are you being serious?  Chuck Thompson: I am being serious. I understand that the meta arguments here that call for secession can be received as somewhat absurd in some corners. I acknowledge that it is probably a remote possibility. Within the framework of that argument I think there is a lot of room to highlight a lot of these problems, and a lot of these frustrations that you refer to. One of the goals of this book really was to more or less articulate, to put some facts, figures and research behind a lot of this frustration of Northern and Southern liberals, of which there are many.    

Prof Michel Chossudovsky: Secret Plan to Assassinate Syrian President

At a time when the British press was still "reporting the truth", London's Guardian published a detailed report of a 1957 Anglo American assassination plot directed against the Syrian president, with a view to implementing "regime change". The similarity to today's war on Syria is striking. What is revealing is that the political assassination of the Syrian president has been on the Anglo American drawing board for over half a century. The article, which reviews the text of the leaked 'Secret Document' confirms that British Prime Minister Harold Macmillian and President Dwight D Eisenhower had ordered the assassination of the Syrian Head of State. Documents show White House and No 10 conspired over oil fueled invasion plan. The stated objective of this secret plan, entrusted to Britain's Secret Intelligence Services (SIS) and the CIA, consisted in assassinating the Syrian president together with key political and military figures. "Mr Macmillan and President Eisenhower were left in no doubt about the need to assassinate the top men in Damascus." "In order to facilitate the action of 'liberative' forces, to hold losses and destruction to a minimum, and to bring about desired results in the shortest possible time, a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals. Their removal should be accomplished early in the course of the uprising and intervention, and in the light of circumstances existing at the time." (The Guardian, 27 September 2003). The stated pretext of the Macmillan Eisenhower plan was that Syria was "spreading terrorism" and "preventing the West's access to Middle East oil". The secret 1957 Plan called for the funding of a so called "Free Syria Committee" equivalent to today's Syrian National Council (SNC). It also involved "the arming of "political factions with paramilitary or other actionist capabilities within Syria. Under the plan, the CIA together with Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) "would instigate internal uprisings".     

Rick Rozoff: NATO's Neo-Ottoman Spearhead in the Middle East

A 1921 agreement between Ottoman Turkey and France, the Treaty of Ankara, the latter at the time the colonial administrator of Syria, granted Turkey the right to station military personnel at the mausoleum of Suleyman Shah, the grandfather of the founder of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey considers the area adjacent to the tomb to be its, and not Syria's sovereign territory, and late last month reinforced its 15 troop contingent there. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stated the following in an interview televised on August 5: The tomb of Suleyman Sah and the land surrounding it is our territory. We cannot ignore any unfavorable act against that monument, as it would be an attack on our territory, as well as an attack on NATO land. Everyone knows his duty, and will continue to do what is necessary. The grave-site of a Seljuk sultan who was reputed to have drowned in the Euphrates River while on campaign of conquest is now proclaimed a NATO outpost in Syria. If confirmation were required that a "neo" Ottoman Turkey is determined to reassert the influence and authority in Mesopotamia it gained 700 years before and lost a century ago and, moreover that it was doing so as a part of a campaign by self christened global NATO to expand into the Arab world, the Turkish head of states to militarily intervene in Syria with the support of its 27 NATO allies should provide it. Especially as the above complements and reinforces the roles of the US and NATO in providing military assistance to Ankara in its current war of attrition against the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey and Iraq, with Syria soon to follow!  

Prof. James Petras: The Ascendancy of a Criminal Elite!

Never in the history of the United States have we witnessed crimes committed on the scale and scope of the present day, by both private and state elites. An economist of impeccable credentials, James Henry, former chief economist at the prestigious consulting firm McKinsey & Company, has researched and documented tax evasion. He found that the super wealthy and their families have as much as $32 trillion (USD) of hidden assets in offshore tax havens, representing up to $280 billion in lost tax revenue! This study excluded such non financial assets as real estate, precious metals, jewels, yachts, race horses, luxury vehicles, and so on. Of the $32 trillion in hidden assets, $23 trillion is held by the super rich of North America and Europe. A recent report by a United Nations Special Committee on Money Laundering, found that US and European banks laundered over $300 billion a year, including $30 billion just from the Mexican drug cartels. New reports on the multi-billion dollar financial swindles involving the major banks in the US and Europe are published each week. England's leading banks, including Barclay's and a host of others, have been identified as having rigged the LIBOR, or inter bank lending rate for years, in order to maximize profits. The Bank of New York, JP Morgan, HSBC, Wachovia and Citibank are among scores of banks which have been charged with laundering drug money and other illicit funds, according to investigations from the US Senate Banking Committees. Multi-national corporations receive federal bailout funds and tax exemptions and then, in violation of publicized agreements with the government, relocate plants and jobs in Asia and Mexico. Major investment houses, like Goldman Sachs, have conned investors for years to invest in garbage equities, while the brokers pumped and dumped the worthless stocks. 

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: The True Events of 9/11!

"In the US on September 11, 2011, the tenth anniversary of 9/11, politicians and their "presstitute" media presented Americans with a Day of Remembrance, a propaganda exercise that hardened the 9/11 lies into dogma. Meanwhile, in Toronto Canada, at Ryerson University the four day International Hearings on the Events of September 11, 2001, came to a close at 5pm. During the for days of hearings, distinguished scientists and scholars and professional architects and engineers presented the results of years of their independent research into all aspects of 9/11 to a distinguished panel, consisting of the honorary president of the Italian Supreme Court, who was an investigative judge who presided over terrorism cases, and three distinguished scholars of high renown and judgment. The distinguished panels task was to produce a report with their judgment of the evidence presented by the expert witnesses. The Toronto Hearings were streamed live over the Internet. I was able to watch many of the presentations over the four days. I was impressed that the extremely high level of intelligence and scientific competence of the witnesses was matched by a high level of integrity, a quality rare in US politics, and totally absent in the American media. As one whose own contributions to economics, now belatedly recognized, is outside the box, I am responsive to those who can escape peer pressure in order to advance truth. Here are some of the important things I learned from the Toronto meetings: The NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government agency) reports on the twin towers and building 7 are fraudulent. Witnesses at the Toronto Hearings proved that building 7 was a standard controlled demolition, and that incendiaries and explosives brought down the twin towers. There is no doubt whatsoever about this. Anyone who declares the contrary has no scientific basis upon which to stand. Those who defend the "official" story believe in miracles that defy the laws of physics.     

Mike Lofgren: How Religion Destroyed My Party.

Having observed politics up close and personal for most of my adult lifetime, I have come to the conclusion that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism may have been the key ingredient in the transformation of the Republican Party. Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes, at least in the minds of its followers, all three of the GOP's main tenets: Wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war. Religious cranks ceased to be minor public nuisance in the 1970s and grew into a major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson's strong showing in the 1988 Iowa presidential caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. Unfortunately, at the time I mostly underestimated the implications of what I was seeing. It did strike me as oddly humorous that a fundamentalist staff member in my congressional office was going to take time off to convert the heathen in Greece, a country that had been overwhelmingly Christian for almost two thousand years. I recall another point, in the early 1990s, when a different fundamentalist GOP staffer said that dinosaur fossils were a hoax. As a mere legislative mechanic toiling away in what I held to be a civil rather than ecclesiastic calling, I did not see that ideological impulses far different from mine were poised to capture the party of Lincoln. The results of this takeover are all around us: If the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians or Canadians on questions of evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons, and so forth, it is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party, and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary beliefs. All around us now, is a prevailing anti intellectualism and hostility to science. Politicized religion is the sheet anchor of the dreary forty year old culture wars. The Constitution notwithstanding, there is now a de facto religious test for the presidency. Major candidates are encouraged, or coerced, to share their feelings about their faith in a revelatory speech, or a televangelist will dragoon the candidates to debate the finer points of Christology, offering himself as the final arbiter!