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05.17 Why American Colleges Are Becoming a Force for Inequality 05.17 Why Private Schools Are Dying Out Letters
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05.24 How to Make Staggering Amounts of Money and Ruin the Planet 05.23 The Canadian War on Science: A long, unexaggerated, devastating chronological indictment 05.22 Global inaction shows that the climate sceptics have already won [6:22 video] 05.22 Dylan Ratigan & Life After Cable News [5:39 video] 05.21 Ellen Page [6:49 video] 05.20 Lisa P. Jackson [6:19 video] 05.20 Climate Change Denial is Costing us Trillions, Threatening Farming, Fishing, Animals (Video) 05.20 Blinding Us From Science 05.20 The Baltimore Lead Study [3:17 video] 05.19 A Black Mound of Canadian Oil Waste Is Rising Over Detroit 05.18 Four Examples from the Last Week Prove Obama Is Full of Hot Air on Climate Protection 05.17 The Murky World of Hospital Prices 05.17 New Jersey Hospital Is the Costliest in the Nation 05.17 Angelina Jolie has done something extraordinary 05.17 Obama must Make Fighting Climate Change National Project, or Die the death of a thousand Scandals 05.17 Study: Why Pot Smokers Are Skinnier 05.16 What Will It Take for Us to Recognize That the Way We Live Could Be Destroying Life as We Know It? 05.16 How Drug Companies Keep Medicine Out of Reach Video Health Care Systems in Less Corrupt Countries News Media
05.23 WSJ Argues For Reducing Historically Low Corporate Tax Burden 05.23 PBS and the Koch Brother Scandal (plus “Koch Brothers Exposed”) [1:00:52 video] 05.22 Costs of Spying on the AP That the Establishment Ignores 05.22 Greg Sargent (and others) are playing us rubes! Daily FAIR Blog Justice Matters
05.24 Priorities USA - Too Big to Jail [4:34 video] 05.24 Priorities USA [4:29 video] 05.21 Guatemala annuls Rios Montt's genocide conviction 05.21 Obama DOJ formally accuses journalist in leak case of committing crimes 05.21 The Criminal Case Against the Tea Party Cabal and Why the Justice Department Won’t Pursue It 05.21 Carl Hiaasen: IRS went after small fry, but let the big ones get away 05.18 Senator wants U.S. in oil price-fixing probe 05.18 Timothy Geithner Is Key To IRS Scandal 05.16 Why Won't the SEC Rein In the Firms That Tanked America's Economy? 05.16 Elizabeth Warren to Obama Administration: Take the Banks to Court, Already! US Politics, Policy & Culture
05.24 10 Most Absurd Sex Tips from the Christian Right 05.23 Six Facts Lost in the IRS Scandal 05.23 The Long, Sordid History of the American Right and Racism 05.17 The Great American Descent into Plutocracy 05.17 The Real Benghazi Scandal 05.16 Take Politics Away From the I.R.S. 05.16 Should 501(c)(4)’s Be Eliminated? 05.16 What We Mean When We Say 'Race Is a Social Construct' High Crimes?
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05.24 Japan the Model 05.24 The Mad Science of the National Debt 05.24 The Truthseeker: Wall Street $$$$s the world (E15) [11:04 video] 05.23 Deja Vu on the Hill: Wall Street Lobbyists Roll Back Finance Reform, Again 05.22 Even Before Apple Tax Breaks, Ireland’s Policy Had Its Critics 05.22 Apple Avoids Paying $17 Million In Taxes Every Day Through A Ballsy But Genius Tax Avoidance Scheme 05.22 David Dayen: The Uprising of the Second Tier in a Time of Late Capitalism 05.20 Paul Krugman’s right: Austerity kills 05.20 Is EVERY Market Rigged? 05.19 Can two senators end ‘too big to fail’? 05.18 Pope blames tyranny of capitalism for making people miserable[1:00 video] 05.18 A Simple Graph That Should Silence Austerians and Gold Bugs Forever [graph] 05.18 The Savings Heist 05.18 Sheila Krumholz and Danielle Brian on How Money Rules Washington [20:31 video] Ref. : Susan Crawford on Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly and Unfair [25:35 video] Ref. : Nurses vs. High-Speed Traders Ref. : We’re More Unequal Than You Think – Graphic: Unequal rise in income International
05.24 BBC poll: Germany most popular country in the world [chart] 05.24 Chinese Military Renews Cyber-Attacks, Focusing on US Electrical Grid 05.24 Why Has Humanity Always Fantasized About the Capture and Rape of Women? 05.23 New Documents Reveal How a 1980s Nuclear War Scare Became a Full-Blown Crisis 05.22 C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh: The Great Jobs Disaster 05.21 Jobless Youth: Europe's Hollow Efforts to Save a Lost Generation 05.21 The Job Market of 2045 [14:32 podcast] 05.19 Italy coalition: Thousands rally in Rome against cuts [graphic] 05.18 Hans Rosling: the man who's making data cool [3:19 video] 05.18 Washington gets explicit: its 'war on terror' is permanent 05.17 Egypt 'suffering worst economic crisis since 1930s' 05.16 Catholic Church Finally Decides That Austerity is Bad We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
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COMMENTARY:Thank You, Ron PaulDuring the recent Republican debate, Congressman Ron Paul spoke the truth about U.S. Middle East policies and faced down attacks by hostile fellow presidential candidates.
Ron Paul, a Republican congressman running for president, is saying what needs to be said about the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war. Clearly, his rivals and the news media can't handle the truth.At the most recent Republican debate, Paul not only repeated his opposition to the illegal and unconstitutional war, but he also identified 50 years of U.S. intervention in the Middle East as "a major contributing factor" in al-Qaeda's attacks in 2001.
Paul thus becomes the first person in mainstream politics--he's been in Congress many years--to acknowledge that U.S. foreign policy has had bad consequences not only for people in the Middle East but for Americans at home as well. A government cannot take sides in so many deep-seated conflicts for as long as the U.S. government has without acquiring enemies and provoking retaliation. It doesn't take much knowledge of history and human nature--not to mention the official 9/11 Commission report--to see this. It's about time it was said in such a prominent forum. Of course, the reaction was stunningly absurd.
FOX News questioner Wendell Goler asked Paul a stunningly absurd and disingenuous follow-up question.
FOX News questioner Wendell Goler said in follow-up, "Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?"Let's examine the question. To invite something is to desire the thing invited. Paul suggested no such thing. And who is "we"? Goler's question implies that Paul was saying the American people or "America" invited the attacks. But Paul was talking about American policymakers, not the American people. So the question was way off the mark and may have been an attempt to bait Paul. He wouldn't take the bait. "I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it," he said. In other words, the people who masterminded the attack did not say they did it because we Americans are rich or free or non-Muslim. Their grievances relate to systematic U.S. intervention in the region: in particular, the presence of troops near holy sites in Saudi Arabia; a 10-year bombing campaign and killer embargo on Iraq (beginning in 1991), which cost hundreds of thousands of lives; and support for Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Rudolph Giuliani, also running for the nomination, responded demagogically, "That's an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq.... I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that."
"If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred," said Congressman Paul, "then we have a problem."
Of course, Paul never said "we invited the attack." And he didn't back down under Giuliani's grandstanding: "I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about 'blowback.' When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the shah, yes, there was blowback. A reaction to that was the taking of our hostages and that persists. And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem."In saying "blowback," Paul was using the CIA's term for the unintended bad consequences of a government operation. He specifically mentioned Iran in 1953, when the Eisenhower administration sent the CIA to help drive an elected secular prime minister from office and return the despotic shah to power. The result was the 1979 Islamic revolution, the seizure of the American embassy, complete with hostages, and close to 30 years of hostility, with war perhaps to come. U.S. imperialist polices in the Middle East have been good for special interests and power-loving politicians, but bad for the American people. Someone in government has finally had the courage to say so. Thank you, Ron Paul. Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation and editor of The Freeman magazine.
Copyright © 2007 The Baltimore Chronicle. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent. This story was published on May 18, 2007. |
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