Dave Lindorff

Let me state from the get-go that I'm no opponent of gun ownership (got my first rifle at the age of 12 and am still a crack shot). But something weird is going on when you have guys wandering around a political rally or protest site with pistols strapped to their thighs, or semi-automatic assault rifles strapped brazenly to their backs, as has been happening outside of venues where President Obama is speaking.

Before we get to the legal issues here, I just want to paint you a mental picture:

Take yourself back to the time when George W. Bush was president and Dick Cheney was Vice President. Both men were barnstorming around the country in those years, either ginning up support for their pointless war in Iraq or campaigning for Republicans in Congressional races, or for their own re-election. The response of police in charge of crowd control at these events -- always the same -- was dependent upon who was lining the streets. If there were people sporting signs that backed the administration, they were left alone. If, however, it was someone wearing something such as an "Impeach Bush" T-shirt, or carrying a sign saying "U.S. Out of Iraq" or some other critical statement, he or she was given a choice: move to a fenced in "Free Speech Zone" out of sight of the presidential or vice-presidential entourage, or face arrest.

I investigated and wrote about what was happening back then, and learned that the order to clear protesters away from wherever the president or vice president would be was being made by the Secret Service and the White House advance team. As I was told at the time by Paul Wolf, a deputy police chief for Allegheny County, PA, where Bush had come in 2003, the decision to pen in Bush critics at that event originated with the Secret Service. "Generally, we don't put protesters inside enclosures," Wolf said. "The only time I remember us doing that was a Ku Klux Klan rally, where there was an opposing rally, and we had to put up a fence to separate them."

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Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the presidency and dragged the U.S. into the utterly pointless and incredibly bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party, shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.

Not because he is the Great Black Hope of progressives, but because he has taken the concept of selling out to corporate interests and compromising with Republicans to such remarkable heights that progressives hopefully can no longer be confused about the irretrievably corrupted nature of the Democratic Party.

On virtually every issue of importance, President Obama has sided with corporate interests and the wealthy.

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Some critics have written, in response to my article calling for extension of the single-payer plan called Medicare to all Americans, that actually Medicare is a badly flawed program that leaves America's elderly without coverage for many important health services, and which requires them to pay for supplemental insurance, or to go on Medicaid, too.

These critics are correct. Medicare is great as far as it goes. It is simple for people to use, allows them to go to the doctors of their choice, covers 80 percent of their care, and is liked by nearly all who use it. But it doesn't pay for needed tests, only lets seniors buy mediocre medical devices such as hearing aids, and most importantly, it has been requiring more and more contributions by the elderly year after year. Today, Americans over 65 and the permanently disabled pay a greater percentage of their income for medical care than they did in 1964 before Medicare was established!

But having said that, I have to say that it has nothing to do with whether or not it makes sense to expand Medicare to all Americans as a way to solve our health care crisis -- as Rep. John Conyers' bill, HR 676, would do.

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BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

By Dave Lindorff

OMG! Those protesters showing up at Democratic “town meetings” to promote the president’s health care “reform” program are being bused in from out of town?

Scandal! Que horrible! (Gasp)

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As I wrote months ago in an article titled America's Stupid Health Care Debate: Keeping Some Ideas Off the Table and several subsequent pieces on my Web site, President Obama and the Democrats who currently run Congress have been hoist on their own collective petard by their craven and gutless refusal to consider adopting a Canadian-style single-payer system to finance health care in the U.S., or simply to expand Medicare, which is a successful single-payer program, to cover everyone, instead of just people over 65 and the disabled.

Instead, because they are the recipients of hundreds of millions of dollars in legal (and probably plenty of illegal) bribes from the health care industry, they have cobbled together a "reform" in name only, which preserves not just the central role of the vampire-like health insurance industry, but also ensures the continued rapacious profitability of the other segments of the medical-industrial complex -- the hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, and the specialist doctors.

Now, such as Hillary and Bill Clinton before them, these weasels and slimeballs who pose as the people's advocates are left with nothing but a Potemkin Health Plan that looks on the outside like a reform, but that changes little or nothing, leaves vast numbers of Americans uninsured, forces tens of millions to buy crappy plans from private companies, and that will end up doing nothing to halt the continuing rise in health care costs that is bankrupting the people, employers, and the country.

Nice going guys!

Let's for a moment consider what could have happened.

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The "happy talk" campaign in the U.S. media and coming from the White House is just that: Happy Talk.

To get a real picture of what is happening with this economy, here are a few things to keep in mind.

Yes, the rate of decline in economic activity has slowed. But that is to be expected. When an economy is going at full tilt, as the U.S. economy was doing in early 2007, a slowdown of any significance yields huge numbers, in terms of falling production, falling factory utilization, falling car sales, or, this time around, falling housing prices.

But once you get to the same period in 2008, you're already in a deep recession, and there really isn't that much farther to fall. If, for example, the carmakers have basically shut down by fall of 2008, and are just working off huge inventories, then you are not going to see more factory closings and further reductions in production (how do you reduce production below zero?).

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What's the difference between a Blue Dog Democrat and a progressive Democrat? One is a vertebrate with a spine and a willingness to bite. The other is a jellyfish with no spine and no teeth.

This difference has been glaringly apparent in the current fight over health care reform.

The Blue Dogs in House and Senate have been giving the progressive Democrats an object lesson in how a small group in Congress can get its way. They have threatened to withhold their support for the Obama Administration's key policy objective of a health reform package, and have managed, with just a handful of votes between them, to remove almost all progressive content from that legislation by threatening to walk if they don't get their way.

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I don't normally bother commenting on the writings of columnists such as David Brooks, but today I can't help myself.

Brooks earlier this week wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times elaborating on a blog on the site Marginal Revolution, in which that site's two economists speculated on what would happen if a solar event instantly sterilized everyone, male and female, on the side of the Earth that was facing the sun at that moment, and if that side happened to include both the U.S. and Europe.

Brooks fretted that if the people of these regions (and of course South America and Africa, which are on the same half of the globe, but which Brooks conveniently ignores) were suddenly to realize they would have no descendants, it would be the end of all "grand designs." There would, he said, be no more justice, no sacrificing for the future, no more building of great buildings.

Brooks and the authors of this nightmare fantasy took the view that if the citizens of what Brooks perceives as "Western Civilization" were to have no hope of offspring, there would within weeks be an end to all striving.

After I finished laughing, I started to think seriously about the idea.

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Agent Orange, the herbicide used as a weapon by U.S. military forces in Vietnam for nearly a decade to defoliate vast stretches of inhabited forest and jungle in an effort to deprive the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces of both cover and a supportive populace, has long been known to have caused a large number of serious and debilitating diseases, many of them passed on to children of those exposed. But now it also appears to cause a peculiar blindness among American journalists.

This is demonstrably the case at The New York Times, where a report in Saturday's edition on new Agent Orange links being found to Parkinson's Disease and ischemic heart disease noted that it could lead to many more Vietnam War Era veterans being eligible for disability benefits and treatment, but completely failed to mention the significance of the discovery for the millions of Vietnamese who were also exposed to the chemical -- and for their descendants.

The new link was announced in a report by a 14-member committee of the Institute of Medicine, which had been asked to determine what conditions might be traced to exposure to the chemical that had been "used to clear stretches of the jungle" in Vietnam. As the article noted, since 1994, the Institute of Medicine has to date found 17 medical conditions that can be traced to exposure to Agent Orange, "13 of which qualify veterans for service-connected disability benefits."

There's a lot wrong with this article, as written by Times reporter Janie Lorber (though admittedly we can't know what is her responsibility and what is the handiwork of the newspaper's editors).

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Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley has gone whining to his professional organization, the Cambridge Police Superior Officers Association, asking for support in calling for President Obama to apologize for saying he acted "stupidly" in arresting Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates after first suspecting the prominent African-American scholar of being a burglar caught breaking into Gates' own home.

Sgt. Crowley claims he was totally justified in making the arrest on a charge of "disorderly conduct" (later dropped by the police), because Gates, who actually had been forced to break into his own home during a return from a speaking tour in China when the front door was stuck, had allegedly become "enraged" when the officer confronted him and asked for identification. Crowley claims that Gates called him names, called him a racist, and threatened to file a complaint against him, and that as a result he arrested him.

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