Re: More class acts by the Dems

GOP debate, 2012

Mrs Palin, the last time you held executive office, you quit after 2
years. Why should we expect anything different now?

Mrs. Palin, your TV show's ad has you saying you want nothing to do
with "stuffy political office" What has changed?

Mrs Palin. Goodbye

On Dec 31, 12:36 am, dick thompson <rhomp2...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> c    
> +--------------------------------------------------------------------------­------------------------------
> | Democrats Crowdsourcing To Vote Palin In Primaries
> |   from the can-you-see-the-primary-from-here? dept.
> |   posted by timothy on Thursday December 30, @16:50 (Democrats)
> |  https://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/12/30/213246/Democrats-Crowdso...
> +--------------------------------------------------------------------------­------------------------------
>
> SharpieMarker writes "In what could be the most extreme and influential
> crowdsourcing project ever, Democrats are beginning to organize to
> [0]purposely vote for Palin in the 2012 Republican primaries. Their
> theory is by having Palin as an opponent, Obama will have the best odds
> at winning reelection. Recent polls have shown that Obama comfortably
> leads Palin by 10-20 points, but Obama is statistically tied with Romney
> and barely ahead of Huckabee. They even have a [1]state-by-state primary
> voting guide to help Democrats navigate various states' rules for voting
> Palin in Republican primaries."
>
> Discuss this story at:
>
> https://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/12/30/213246/Democrats-Crowdso...
>
> Links:
>      0.http://www.primariesforpalin.com/?page_id=2
>      1.http://www.primariesforpalin.com/?page_id=24

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Is Big Government a Myth?

Is Big Government a Myth?
Thursday, December 30, 2010
by Robert P. Murphy

Lately the supporters of big government have deployed an interesting twist to their arguments, claiming that it is a dirty right-wing lie that government has grown under the Obama administration. Unlike arguments over economic theory, surely this should be an objective exercise in looking up the facts.

As we'll see, yes Virginia there is indeed a big -- and growing -- government in DC, as even that government's own numbers confirm. Although this conclusion won't surprise the readers of this column, it will still be fun to analyze Paul Krugman's attempts to deny the obvious.


Government Employment: Does Krugman Think His Readers Can't Read Graphs?

We'll split up Krugman's alleged myth busting into two parts: government employment and government spending. Here is Krugman on December 20, catching those dastardly right-wingers in an alleged lie:

Actually, this might be a better picture for making the point about how rightists used the temporary bulge in Census hiring to spread the false impression of soaring government employment:

See, if you measure right at the top of that peak at the right, pretend not to notice that it's all Census workers, and never update the number, you get your myth inserted into the discourse, and it becomes part of what everyone knows.

As always, let's make sure we understand what Krugman's point is. He is claiming that right-wing pundits and politicians were cherry-picking numbers from the temporary Census hiring ­ shown by the big spike in 2010 ­ in order to paint a picture of a growing federal government amidst a shrinking private sector.

Now of course, I am not here to defend every op-ed penned by an Obama critic, and certainly not the accuracy of Republican politicians. (That would be akin to judging Keynesian economics from the speeches of Joe Biden.)

But look at Krugman's own chart: It shows that federal government employment was relatively flat for five years ­ from 2003 to 2008 ­ and then it took off quite sharply. Just eyeballing the chart, it looks like federal employment has grown under the Obama administration by about 150,000, even after we net out the temporary Census hiring. If the above chart showed the number of Americans without access to basic health care ­ and if the last two years occurred under a Republican administration ­ does anyone doubt that Krugman would point to the shocking surge in the problem?

It's true, the upswing in federal employment began in 2008, under the Bush administration. And that's why it's silly for partisan talk-show hosts to blame "big government" on Democrats. But at the same time, it's silly for Krugman and other partisan bloggers to deny that government has indeed become bigger under Obama's tenure.


Government Spending: Just Look Up the Numbers

Krugman thinks he can debunk the "myth" of big government using data on expenditures, too. In a Christmas Eve blog post, Krugman wrote,

I've written a lot lately about the great government job explosion myth; I thought I'd put down a bit about the dollars and cents side of things, in part so that I have the data ready at hand for future reference.

So how does one debunk the exploding government spending story? It's not quite as easy as the employment issue ­ but it remains true that the idea that we've seen a surge in the size of government is basically wrong. Let me walk through the issues.

What you often see, for starters, is a chart like this, showing government spending (federal, state, and local) as a percentage of GDP:

Huge surge!

After his sarcastic "huge surge" comment, Krugman then goes on to explain why this graph really doesn't mean what your eyes might be suggesting. Yet before we delve into the various arguments Krugman deploys to explain away the above chart, it's important to point out that Krugman is stacking the deck from the start.

By saying, "What you often see, for starters, is a chart like this," Krugman makes it sound as if he is tackling the toughest bit of evidence for those trying to say Obama is a big-government guy.

Yet as Krugman himself knows -- and has stressed many times -- depending on which time period you analyze, some of the growth in federal government spending has been offset (though not fully) by a reduction in state and local government spending.

Now it's true that many right-wing critics of Obama probably don't have such fine distinctions in mind when they rail against the "recent surge in government." But I bet if a had a bullhorn I could get a Tea Party crowd pretty worked up by saying, "Can you patriots believe this? The federal government is growing, while state and local governments have to lay off teachers and firefighters! So grab your pitchforks and let's go give Obama a lesson in federalism he'll never forget!"

I should also point out that this isn't merely a case of adjusting the rhetoric to fit the facts. For example, suppose that there really had been an enormous surge ­ even by Krugman's odd definitions ­ in total government spending since 2009, but that it happened at the state and local levels, whereas the Obama administration actually slashed federal spending. Would Krugman shamefacedly admit, "Yep, 'government' has grown under Obama; Bill O'Reilly is right"?

Of course he wouldn't. He would rightfully argue that if we're going to judge whether Barack Obama is presiding over the growth in Big Government, we should look at the spending that is actually under Obama's control, i.e., federal spending.

When we do that, we find that from the 4th quarter of 2008 through the 3rd quarter of 2010, federal spending as a share of GDP grew about 3.4 percentage points (from 22.1 percent to 25.5 percent). In contrast, the statistic Krugman looks at ­ total government spending at the federal, state, and local levels ­ only grew about 2.7 percentage points (from 33.4 percent to 36.1 percent) in the same period.[1]

Another way to see just how unusual the growth in federal spending under Obama has been is to chart the 12-month growth rate of federal spending:


So when Krugman asks, "Where is this myth of a surge in spending under Obama coming from?" we can offer him a straightforward reply: well, Dr. Krugman, in Obama's first year in office, federal-government expenditures grew at the fastest rate in 17 years, far higher than in the first Bush administration, when you were railing against the Republican president for starting two wars without paying for them.

But let's return to Krugman's article, to see what other tricks he uses to wipe out the growth in government:

So, why doesn't this graph show a surge in government?

First of all, look at the fact that the ratio of government spending to GDP always rises during recession. That's largely not because spending is up, it's because GDP is down.

I'm surprised Krugman is still bringing up this point; it blew up in his face back in October when he first used it. Back then, in a post sarcastically titled, "Special Bulletin: Fractions Have Denominators," Krugman also tried to show that the apparent rise in government spending as a share of the economy, was due to falling GDP. And indeed, if you click the link, you'll see two different graphs: the first, depicting government spending as a share of GDP, shows a huge uptick since 2008, whereas the second graph (depicting the level of absolute spending) reveals a very modest increase.

Unfortunately for Krugman, several people in the comments (e.g. here and here) pointed out that the visual difference in his two graphs was due entirely to his use of the zero point in the bottom graph, but not in the top graph. If Krugman had used a consistent starting point for the y axis, then the two graphs would have looked similar.

Because "spending as a share of the economy" will be higher during periods of recession, Krugman wants to divide total spending, not by actual GDP, but by potential GDP. This way, Krugman hopes to avoid unfairly painting government as big when it's really just the fault of the shrinking economy.

Yet notice that this move depends on Krugman's Keynesian worldview. In the Austrian view, the reason we are in a severe recession ­ and hence the fall in measured output ­ is that we were previously in a Fed-induced artificial boom. So we can't simply assume that the economy would have continued along its trend line for the last decade, in order to compute what GDP "ought" to have been in 2009 and 2010.

In any event, whether we divide by actual or "potential" GDP, Krugman can't get around the basic numbers. Actual government spending has grown a lot in the last few years, so how does Krugman explain it away?

So what's behind that more limited rise? Mainly, it's about people losing their jobs and their incomes, and therefore turning to aid programs. Unemployment benefits account for almost half the rise in spending:

Food stamp outlays have also surged.

And while I've had trouble tracking down a dollar number, Medicaid rolls rose 13.6 percent from Dec. 2007 to Dec. 2009.

What's left after you take account of these emergency aid programs? Not much, if anything.

So that's the story: despite what you've heard, there hasn't been any surge in the size and role of government.

As longtime readers know, I typically treat Paul Krugman with kid gloves. That's why I won't come out and accuse him of actually lying here, although it's difficult for me to even understand how he's generating the above claims.

For example, Krugman says that unemployment benefits account for "almost half the rise in spending." Since his own chart shows that unemployment benefits are about $150 billion, Krugman's readers would think that government spending itself has only grown a little more than $300 billion.

Yet this isn't the case, no matter how you slice it. If we look at federal spending under Barack Obama, it's not even close: it has risen more than $600 billion since he assumed office. But even if we switch to total government spending, it's risen more than $575 billion in the same period. Finally, if we go back to late 2007 as the starting point ­ which Krugman did for his Medicaid stat ­ then the growth in total government spending is almost $800 billion.


We Have Always Been at War With Small Government

As we've seen, the actual numbers show what everybody knows: government at all levels has grown, and in particular at the federal level, since the crisis began, and also since Barack Obama took office. So it's really not a myth when people complain about the "big government" of Barack Obama.

Therefore, Krugman should not be so exasperated with Republicans when they try to pin the big-government label on Obama. In fact, Krugman himself did the same thing in August 2009, when he wrote:

So it seems that we aren't going to have a second Great Depression after all. What saved us? The answer, basically, is Big Government. …

Probably the most important aspect of the government's role in this crisis isn't what it has done, but what it hasn't done: unlike the private sector, the federal government hasn't slashed spending as its income has fallen. …

In addition to having this "automatic" stabilizing effect, the government has stepped in to rescue the financial sector. …

Last and probably least, but by no means trivial, have been the deliberate efforts of the government to pump up the economy. From the beginning, I argued that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the Obama stimulus plan, was too small. Nonetheless, reasonable estimates suggest that around a million more Americans are working now than would have been employed without that plan ­ a number that will grow over time ­ and that the stimulus has played a significant role in pulling the economy out of its free fall.

All in all, then, the government has played a crucial stabilizing role in this economic crisis. Ronald Reagan was wrong: sometimes the private sector is the problem, and government is the solution.

And aren't you glad that right now the government is being run by people who don't hate government?

We don't know what the economic policies of a McCain-Palin administration would have been. We do know, however, what Republicans in opposition have been saying ­ and it boils down to demanding that the government stop standing in the way of a possible depression. …

And Big Government, run by people who understand its virtues, is the reason why. (emphasis added)

And there you have it: When conservative pundits rail against "big-government Obama," Krugman says they are dirty rotten liars. But the same Krugman praises the Big Government of the Obama administration and contrasts it with the likely horrors of a McCain-Palin one. It's not merely the automatic stabilizers, and not even the interventions in banking that saved the day, but also the explicit efforts of the Obama administration to spend more money.


Conclusion

Experienced readers know that being a self-styled progressive means never saying you're sorry. I know full well that Krugman's fans will be able to explain away the above as a perfectly consistent record of economic analysis.

Nonetheless, it's useful to periodically explain just how Krugman and other proponents of big government try to frame the debate. Quite clearly, government has been growing, particularly under the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Just as it is foolish for Krugman and other Democrats to deny the obvious facts of the Obama record, it is likewise absurd when many conservative Republicans make excuses for the Bush years. The only way to arrest this trend is for Americans to oppose big government, period, regardless of an "R" or "D" after a president's name.




Robert Murphy is an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute, where he will be teaching Anatomy of the Fed at the Mises Academy this winter. He runs the blog Free Advice and is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, the Study Guide to Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, the Human Action Study Guide, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal, and his newest book, Lessons for the Young Economist. Send him mail. See Robert P. Murphy's article archives.


Notes

[1] The data on government expenditures and GDP can be found here .

http://mises.org/daily/4946

Progressivists Should First Heal Themselves

Progressivists Should First Heal Themselves
by William L. Anderson

I generally read the editorial section of the New York Times to get a sense of what elite "Progressivists" are thinking. (I'm referring to the official editorial page as opposed to the rest of the "news" sections which supposedly are not connected to the opinion of Gail Collins and company.)

Progressivists, as one knows, are motivated by grand visions – which they believe should be imposed on everyone else, given that most people would resist such elite wisdom (because, after all, they are too stupid and too uneducated to appreciate the grandeur of the vision that others have for them). Since governments are the only entities that can impose this vision, it should surprise no one that the NYT is thoroughly statist in its news and editorial approaches.

Because the NYT is famous and calls itself the "Newspaper of Record," its Grand Vision (GV) is not limited to the Great Unwashed of the United States. No, Gail Collins and company have a GV for Iraq and Russia, although one doubts that Iraqis and Vladimir Putin really give a damn about what the Grey Lady is telling them what to do.

I saw in today's editorials that Iraq "finally" has a new government, which I guess means all sorts of possibilities of Greatness. From what I can tell, however, this new government might not be up to the NYT standards, or at least the high standards that come from the City of New York (which seems to be having some difficulty removing snow from its streets at the present time).

Anyway, Collins and company had these pearls of wisdom for Iraq's new government:

Iraq's factions, with their competing priorities, are going to have to work hard to make progress on the country's many problems. They must pass laws ensuring an equitable division of the country's oil wealth. They must make sweeping economic reforms, without which there is no chance of creating jobs for the 450,000 mostly young Iraqis entering the work force each year. They need to keep their promise of jobs to the thousands of Sunni fighters who came in from the cold.

I am not sure which "sweeping economic reforms" the editors mean, given that the "sweeping economic reforms" they advocate for the USA usually are socialistic. Nonetheless, I'm just a bit reluctant to say that people who cannot get snow from their own streets (at least without busting up cars in the process) should be giving advice to people living in a desert thousands of miles away.

Given that the NYT was instrumental in leading the U.S. Armed Forces to invade Iraq in the first place (Who can forget Judith Miller, although we might want to forget Judith Miller?), it seems to be the ultimate of chutzpah for Collins and company to be giving that poor country even more advice, but Progressivists know more than we do, and are happy to let us know.

Besides Iraq, there is Russia to consider. Yes, Russia, the place that gave us the NYT's favorite dictator, Josef Stalin. Russia is the place that murdered millions while the NYT's man on the spot, Walter Duranty, worked hand-in-glove with Stalin's people to file false reports in the NYT, with the editors at home covering for him. (For those falsehoods, Duranty and the NYT received a Pulitzer Prize which still proudly is on display in the lobby of the NYT building.)

Today, Collins and company urge Russia to engage in the " rule of law." Russia, it seems, does not have fair courts and the NYT wants those Russkies to have courts that are just as just and fair as our own, especially our federal courts.

The collective memory at the NYT tends to be a bit short-term, given that some of us on the outside recall how the "Newspaper of Record" teamed with Rudy Giuliani and his fellow federal prosecutors to publish illegally-leaked grand jury information in order to stack the deck against Michael Milken. You know, Milken, that guy who did not suck up to the other investment banks on Wall Street and who managed to secure financing for a number of important firms whose technological development has changed our lives. A man who does not suck up to Goldman Sachs and David Rockefeller is up to no good, as he fails to share the Same Grand Vision which Progressivists believe should be imposed on everyone else (except themselves).

You see, "rule of law" only applies to the Little People. Really Important People don't have to worry about taking part in criminal schemes to gain false indictments and railroad people into prison (i.e. Martha Stewart). Remember how the NYT was outraged that the late Leona Helmsley allegedly told someone that only "little people" pay taxes? (It seems that the Helmsleys were among the "little people," given that they paid huge amounts of money in taxes, but the editors of the NYT could not let the facts get in the way of a good story, so Leona went to prison, too.)

Progressivists are different than you and me; rule of law does not apply to them, as they are above the law. They have a GV for the rest of us, be it how we will receive medical care, what we eat, what we say, whether or not we are free to travel, how we can use the land that we supposedly own, the kinds of fuels we use to power our vehicles and heat our homes, and how we will be educated.

True, the Progressivists have no plans on taking part in what is to be imposed upon everyone else. Rule of law is good for Russia, but it certainly did not need to apply to Durham, North Carolina, when the NYT's favorite prosecutor, Michael Nifong, was lying in an attempt to railroad some lacrosse players at Duke University for bogus rape charges.

One is tempted to tell these Progressivists to solve their own problems and to live under the same rules they want to have imposed on everyone else. However, we need to remember that just as human beings are Beyond Freedom and Dignity (a Progressivist classic), Those Who Would Rule Us Or Influence Those Who Would Rule Us should not be hindered by mere rules, as they are beyond those mundane things.

Some of us might have the temerity to tell the Physicians to Heal Themselves first, but that is short-sighted on our part. No, we must bow to the Great Wisdom of Collins and company as they lead us to that Great World Beyond Midtown Manhattan. (But forget about the snow being removed from your roads. Greatness requires some sacrifice, you know.)

http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson305.html

America Has Gone Away

America Has Gone Away
by Paul Craig Roberts

Anyone who doesn't believe that the US is an incipient fascist state needs only to consult the latest assault on civil liberty by Fox News (sic). Instead of informing citizens, Fox News (sic) informs on citizens. Jason Ditz reports (antiwar.com Dec. 28) that Fox News (sic) "no longer content to simply shill for a growing police state," turned in a grandmother to the Department of Homeland Security for making "anti-American comments."

The media have segued into the police attitude, which regards insistence on civil liberties and references to the Constitution as signs of extremism, especially when the Constitution is invoked in defense of dissent or privacy or placarded on a bumper sticker. President George W. Bush set the scene when he declared: "you are with us or against us."

Bush's words demonstrate a frightening decline in our government's respect for dissent since the presidency of John F. Kennedy. In a speech to the Newspaper Publishers Association in 1961, President Kennedy said:

"No president should fear public scrutiny of his program, for from that scrutiny comes understanding, and from that understanding comes support or opposition; and both are necessary. . . . Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed, and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian law makers once decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment."

The press is not protected, Kennedy told the newspaper publishers, in order that it can amuse and entertain, emphasize the trivial, or simply tell the public what it wants to hear. The press is protected so that it can find and report facts and, thus, inform, arouse "and sometimes even anger public opinion."

In a statement unlikely to be repeated by an American president, Kennedy told the newspaper publishers: "I'm not asking your newspapers to support an administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people, for I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed."

The America of Kennedy's day and the America of today are two different worlds. In America today the media are expected to lie for the government in order to prevent the people from finding out what the government is up to. If polls can be believed, Americans brainwashed and programmed by O'Reilly, Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh want Bradley Manning and Julian Assange torn limb from limb for informing Americans of the criminal acts of their government. Politicians and journalists are screeching for their execution.

President Kennedy told the Newspaper Publishers Association that "it is to the printing press, the recorder of man's deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news, that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: Free and Independent." Who can imagine a Bill Clinton, a George W. Bush, or a Barack Obama saying such a thing today?

Today the press is a propaganda ministry for the government. Any member who departs from his duty to lie and spin the news is expelled from the fraternity. A public increasingly unemployed, broke and homeless is told that they have vast enemies plotting to destroy them in the absence of annual trillion dollar expenditures for the military/security complex, wars lasting decades, no-fly lists, unlimited spying and collecting of dossiers on citizens supplemented by neighbors reporting on neighbors, full body scanners at airports, shopping centers, metro and train stations, traffic checks, and the equivalence of treason with the uttering of a truth.

Two years ago when he came into office President Obama admitted that no one knew what the military mission was in Afghanistan, including the president himself, but that he would find a mission and define it. On his recent trip to Afghanistan, Obama came up with the mission: to make the families of the troops safe in America, his version of Bush's "we have to kill them over there before they kill us over here."

No one snorted with derision or even mildly giggled. Neither the New York Times nor Fox News (sic) dared to wonder if perhaps, maybe, murdering and displacing large numbers of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen and US support for Israel's similar treatment of Lebanese and Palestinians might be creating a hostile environment that could breed terrorists. If there still is such a thing as the Newspaper Publishers Association, its members are incapable of such an unpatriotic thought.

Today no one believes that our country's success depends on an informed public and a free press. America's success depends on its financial and military hegemony over the world. Any information inconsistent with the indispensable people's god-given right to dominate the world must be suppressed and the messenger discredited and destroyed.

Now that the press has voluntarily shed its First Amendment rights, the government is working to redefine free speech as a privilege limited to the media, not a right of citizens. Thus, the insistence that WikiLeaks is not a media organization and Fox News (sic) turning in a citizen for exercising free speech. Washington's assault on Assange and WikiLeaks is an assault on what remains of the US Constitution. When we cheer for WikiLeaks' demise, we are cheering for our own.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/America-Has-Gone-Away-by-paul-craig-roberts-101229-863.html

2011: "Dissent Is What Rescues Democracy"

2011: "Dissent Is What Rescues Democracy"
By Paul Craig Roberts

"Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors." -- Lewis H. Lapham
The year 2011 will bring Americans a larger and more intrusive police state, more unemployment and home foreclosures, no economic recovery, more disregard by the US government of US law, international law, the Constitution, and truth, more suspicion and distrust from allies, more hostility from the rest of the world, and new heights of media sycophancy.

2011 is shaping up as the terminal year for American democracy. The Republican Party has degenerated into a party of Brownshirts, and voter frustrations with the worsening economic crisis and military occupations gone awry are likely to bring Republicans to power in 2012. With them would come their doctrines of executive primacy over Congress, the judiciary, law, and the Constitution and America's rightful hegemony over the world.

If not already obvious, 2010 has made clear that the US government does not care a whit for the opinions of citizens. The TSA is unequivocal that it will reach no accommodation with Americans other than the violations of their persons that it imposes by its unaccountable power. As for public opposition to war, the Associated Press reported on December 16 that "Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the U.S. can't let public opinion sway its commitment to Afghanistan." Gates stated bluntly what has been known for some time: the idea is passé that government in a democracy serves the will of the people. If this quaint notion is still found in civics books, it will soon be edited out.

In Gag Rule , a masterful account of the suppression of dissent and the stifling of democracy, Lewis H. Lapham writes that candor is a necessary virtue if democracies are to survive their follies and crimes. But where in America today can candor be found? Certainly not in the councils of government. Attorney General John Ashcroft complained of candor-mongers to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Americans who insist on speaking their minds, Ashcroft declared, "scare people with phantoms of lost liberty," "aid terrorists," "diminish our resolve," and "give ammunition to America's enemies."

As the Department of Justice (sic) sees it, when the ACLU defends habeas corpus it is defending the ability of terrorists to blow up Americans, and when the ACLU defends the First Amendment it is defending exposures of the lies and deceptions that are the necessary scaffolding for the government's pretense that it is doing God's will while Satan speaks through the voices of dissent.

Neither is candor a trait in which the American media finds comfort. The neoconservative press functions as propaganda ministry for hegemonic American empire, and the "liberal" New York Times serves the same master. It was the New York Times that gave credence to the Bush regime's lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and it was the New York Times that guaranteed Bush's re-election by spiking the story that Bush was committing felonies by spying on Americans without obtaining warrants. Conservatives rant about the "liberal media" as if it were a vast subversive force, but they owe their beloved wars and coverups of the Bush regimes' crimes to the New York Times.
With truth the declared enemy of the fantasy world in which the government, media, and public reside, the nation has turned on whistleblowers.

Bradley Manning, who allegedly provided the media with the video made by US troops of their wanton, fun-filled slaughter of newsmen and civilians, has been abused in solitary confinement for six months. Murdering civilians is a war crime, and as General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the National Press Club on February 17, 2006, "It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal or immoral" and to make such orders known. If Manning is the source of the leak, he has been wrongfully imprisoned for meeting his military responsibility. The media have yet to make the point that the person who reported the crime, not the persons who committed it, is the one who has been imprisoned, and without a trial.

The lawlessness of the US government, which has been creeping up on us for decades, broke into a full gallop in the years of the Bush/Cheney/Obama regimes. Today the government operates above the law, yet maintains that it is a democracy bringing the same to Muslims by force of arms, only briefly being sidetracked by sponsoring a military coup against democracy in Honduras and attempting to overthrow the democratic government in Venezuela.

As 2011 dawns, public discourse in America has the country primed for a fascist dictatorship. The situation will be worse by 2012. The most uncomfortable truth that emerges from the WikiLeaks saga is that American public discourse consists of cries for revenge against those who tell us truths. The vicious mendacity of the US government knows no restraint. Whether or not international law can save Julian Assange from the clutches of the Americans or death by a government black ops unit, both executive and legislative branches are working assiduously to establish the National Security State as the highest value and truth as its greatest enemy.

America's future is the world of Winston Smith.

http://www.whitenewsnow.com/forums/paul-craig-roberts/12668-2011-paul-craig-roberts.html