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Today's Stories

October 9, 2003

Alexander Cockburn
Welcome to Arnold, King for a Day

October 8, 2003

David Lindorff
Schwarzenegger and the Failure of the Centrist Dems

Ramzy Baroud
Israel's WMDs and the West's Double Standard

John Ross
Mexico Tilts South

Mokhiber / Weissman
Repub Guru Compares Taxes to the Holocaust

James Bovard
The Reagan Roadmap for Antiterrorism Disaster

Michael Neumann
One State or Two?
A False Dilemma

 

October 7, 2003

Uri Avnery
Slow-Motion Ethnic Cleansing

Stan Goff
Lost in the Translation at Camp Delta

Ron Jacobs
Yom Kippurs, Past and Present

David Lindorff
Coronado in Iraq

Rep. John Conyers, Jr.
Outing a CIA Operative? Why A Special Prosecutor is Required

Cynthia McKinney
Who Are "We"?

Elaine Cassel
Shock and Awe in the Moussaoui Case

Walter Lippman
Thoughts on the Cali Recall

Gary Leupp
Israel's Attack on Syria: Who's on the Wrong Side of History, Now?

Website of the Day
Cable News Gets in Touch With It's Inner Bigot

 

October 6, 2003

Robert Fisk
US Gave Israel Green Light for Raid on Syria

Forrest Hylton
Upheaval in Bolivia: Crisis and Opportunity

Benjamin Dangl
Divisions Deepen in Third Week of Bolivia's Gas War

Bridget Gibson
Oh, Pioneers!: Bush's New Deal

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
The Bush-Rove-Schwarzenegger Nazi Nexus

Nicole Gamble
Rios Montt's Campaign Threatens Genocide Trials

JoAnn Wypijewski
The New Unity Partnership:
A Manifest Destiny for Labor

Website of the Day
Guerrilla Funk

 

October 3 / 5, 2003

Tim Wise
The Other Race Card: Rush and the Politics of White Resentment

Peter Linebaugh
Rhymsters and Revolutionaries: Joe Hill and the IWW

Gary Leupp
Occupation as Rape-Marriage

Bruce Jackson
Addio Alle Armi

David Krieger
A Nuclear 9/11?

Ray McGovern
L'Affaire Wilsons: Wives are Now "Fair Game" in Bush's War on Whistleblowers

Col. Dan Smith
Why Saddam Didn't Come Clean

Mickey Z.
In Our Own Image: Teaching Iraq How to Deal with Protest

Roger Burbach
Bush Ideologues v. Big Oil in Iraq

John Chuckman
Wesley Clark is Not Cincinnatus

William S. Lind
Versailles on the Potomac

Glen T. Martin
The Corruptions of Patriotism

Anat Yisraeli
Bereavement as Israeli Ethos

Wayne Madsen
Can the Republicans Get Much Worse? Sure, They Can

M. Junaid Alam
The Racism Barrier

William Benzon
Scorsese's Blues

Adam Engel
The Great American Writing Contest

Poets' Basement
McNeill, Albert, Guthrie

 

October 2, 2003

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
What's So Great About Gandhi, Anyway?

Amy Goodman / Jeremy Scahill
The Ashcroft-Rove Connection

Doug Giebel
Kiss and Smear: Novak and the Valerie Plame Affair

Hamid Dabashi
The Moment of Myth: Edward Said (1935-2003)

Elaine Cassel
Chicago Condemns Patriot Act

Saul Landau
Who Got Us Into This Mess?

Website of the Day
Last Day to Save Beit Arabiya!


October 1, 2003

Joanne Mariner
Married with Children: the Supremes and Gay Families

Robert Fisk
Oil, War and Panic

Ron Jacobs
Xenophobia as State Policy

Elaine Cassel
The Lamo Case: Secret Subpoenas and the Patriot Act

Shyam Oberoi
Shooting a Tiger

Toni Solo
Plan Condor, the Sequel?

Sean Donahue
Wesley Clark and the "No Fly" List

Website of the Day
Downloader Legal Defense Fund

 

September 30, 2003

After Dark
Arnold's 1977 Photo Shoot

Dave Lindorff
The Poll of the Shirt: Bush Isn't Wearing Well

Tom Crumpacker
The Cuba Fixation: Shaking Down American Travelers

Robert Fisk
A Lesson in Obfuscation

Charles Sullivan
A Message to Conservatives

Suren Pillay
Edward Said: a South African Perspective

Naeem Mohaiemen
Said at Oberlin: Hysteria in the Face of Truth

Amy Goodman / Jeremy Scahill
Does a Felon Rove the White House?

Website of the Day
The Edward Said Page


September 29, 2003

Robert Fisk
The Myths of Western Intelligence Agencies

Iain A. Boal
Turn It Up: Pardon Mzwakhe Mbuli!

Lee Sustar
Paul Krugman: the Last Liberal?

Wayne Madsen
General Envy? Think Shinseki, Not Clark

Benjamin Dangl
Bolivia's Gas War

Uri Avnery
The Magnificent 27

Pledge Drive of the Day
Antiwar.com

 

September 26 / 28, 2003

Alexander Cockburn
Alan Dershowitz, Plagiarist

David Price
Teaching Suspicions

Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity

Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and the Patriot Act

Brian Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again

Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama

Robert Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions

M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA

John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN

Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada

William S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security

Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia

Chris Floyd
Vanishing Act

Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui

Richard Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved

George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said

Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized

Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss

Mickey Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice

Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said

Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room

Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie

Website of the Weekend
Who the Hell is Stew Albert?

 

September 25, 2003

Edward Said
Dignity, Solidarity and the Penal Colony

Robert Fisk
Fanning the Flames of Hatred

Sarah Ferguson
Wolfowitz at the New School

David Krieger
The Second Nuclear Age

Bill Glahn
RIAA Doublespeak

Al Krebs
ADM and the New York Times: Covering Up Corporate Crime

Michael S. Ladah
The Obvious Solution: Give Iraq Back to the Arabs

Fran Shor
Arnold and Wesley

Mustafa Barghouthi
Edward Said: a Monument to Justice and Human Rights

Alexander Cockburn
Edward Said: a Mighty and Passionate Heart

Website of the Day
Edward Said: a Lecture on the Tragedy of Palestine


The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!


September 24, 2003

Stan Goff
Generational Casualties: the Toxic Legacy of the Iraq War

William Blum
Grand Illusions About Wesley Clark

David Vest
Politics for Bookies

Jon Brown
Stealing Home: The Real Looting is About to Begin

Robert Fisk
Occupation and Censorship

Latino Military Families
Bring Our Children Home Now!

Neve Gordon
Sharon's Preemptive Zeal

Website of the Day
Bands Against Bush

September 23, 2003

Bernardo Issel
Dancing with the Diva: Arianna and Streisand

Gary Leupp
To Kill a Cat: the Unfortunate Incident at the Baghdad Zoo

Gregory Wilpert
An Interview with Hugo Chavez on the CIA in Venezuela

Steven Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause--Part 2: Charity Ryerson, Young and Radical

Stan Cox
The Cheney Tapes: Can You Handle the Truth?

Robert Fisk
Another Bloody Day in the Death of Iraq

William S. Lind
Learning from Uncle Abe: Sacking the Incompetent

Elaine Cassel
First They Come for the Lawyers, Then the Ministers

Yigal Bronner
The Truth About the Wall

Website of the Day
The Baghdad Death Count

September 20 / 22, 2003

Uri Avnery
The Silliest Show in Town

Alexander Cockburn
Lighten Up, America!

Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet

Anne Brodsky
Return to Afghanistan

Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me

Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie

Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open

Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism

Kurt Nimmo
Colin Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja

Brian Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame

Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush

Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda

Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector

Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!

Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq

John Ross
WTO Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold

Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals

Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane

Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization

David Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America

Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps

Poets Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert

Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?

Hot Stories

Alexander Cockburn
Behold, the Head of a Neo-Con!

Subcomandante Marcos
The Death Train of the WTO

Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens as Model Apostate

Steve Niva
Israel's Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?

Dardagan, Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians

Steve J.B.
Prison Bitch

Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda in the Iraq War

Wendell Berry
Small Destructions Add Up

CounterPunch Wire
WMD: Who Said What When

Cindy Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter I Can't Hear From

Gore Vidal
The Erosion of the American Dream

Francis Boyle
Impeach Bush: A Draft Resolution

Click Here for More Stories.

 

 

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October 9, 2003

CounterPunch Diary

Welcome to Arnold, King for a Day

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Gray Davis, good riddance! Into the political coffin with you and off you go to the crypt. The line I remember from your first inauguration speech in Sacramento was your creepy pledge that you would be "death on crime". You let your voice peck at the word "death" like a vulture tasting a corpse, and I remember thinking then what a degraded creature you were, serf of the prison warders' union, and of anyone who shoved enough money into your money sock, the threadbare soul of the Democratic Party.

You played the politics of death all the way through. There are prisoners in California, convicted of murder a couple of decades ago, who've served their full sentences, who kept a perfect record of good behavior, and who still rot behind bars because you wouldn't sign off on their release. And then, in case anyone had forgotten what your were like after four years, you poured out cash to keep Riordan off the Republican ballot, denouncing him because he might be soft on Death.

You had it coming to you, governor Davis, and just look at who knocked you off: the blue collar workers, the union members, the Hispanics who put you in Sacramento, who looked at their utility bills, looked at the economy of California and above all looked at you and shuddered and said Yes to recall; then, many of them, Yes to Bustamante; but enough of them, Yes to Schwarzenegger.

Yes to Arnold, breast grabber in the finest traditions of the Democratic Party, like Bill Clinton and back beyond him the satyr of Camelot, JFK. Yes to Arnold, who may or may not have been soft on Adolf Hitler. What does that mean at this distance? It doesn't look as though Arnold wants to wipe out the Jews. Maybe he knows Hitler was the first Keynesian, and that's the bit of Adolf's legacy he cares about.

Besides, Hitler's a waxwork bogy. Reagan proved that when he went to Bitburg and returned from the SS cemetery unscathed. You want to talk about an up-to-date echo of Nazism? When it comes to ethnic cleansing, daylight murder of political opponents,lethal thuggery and institutional racism, just look at who votes, week by week, month by month, in full-throated verbal and financial support of such practices in Israel in the US Senate, if not the two Democratic senators from California, Feinstein and Boxer.

Californians like the sun, and when they looked at you, governor Davis, they saw the gray of your name, and on your face the sex-less pallor of death and corruption. Better to have Arnold as an intimation of the golden life.

Here in London, as one who once wrote a book titled The Golden Age is In Us, I took myself off on a Saturday to look at an exhibition in the National Galley on Trafalgar Square, called Paradise, a traveling show which had already been shown in Bristol and Newcastle, attracting 160,000 people, apparently double what they would have expected normally in those galleries. People want to know the lineaments of paradise, whose earthly possibilities utopians used to spend much time usefully describing, though not much any more.

The show turned out to be patchy, with the curator scraping together a show from available ingredients, such as a Boucher, a Gauguin, a Constable, a Monet, a Rothko, a couple of Renaissance paintings and so forth. But making my visit entirely worthwhile there was one marvelous painting, one of Stanley Spencer's Cookham paintings about the Last Judgment, done in 1934. It shows a dustman resurrected in his beefy wife's arms, she in "ecstatic communion with the dustman's corduroy trousers" as Spencer put it. Other dustmen and women, plus a cat, surround the couple.

"I feel in this Dustman picture, " Spencer wrote, " that it is like watching and experiencing the inside of a sexual experience. They are all in a state of anticipation and gratitude to each other. They are each to the other, and all to any one of them, as peaceful as the privacy of a lavatory. I cannot feel anything is Heaven where there is any forced exclusion of any sexual desire... The picture is to express a joy of life through intimacy. All the signs and tokens of home life, such as the cabbage leaves and teapot which I have so much loved that I have had them resurrected from the dustbin because they are reminders of home life and peace, and are worthy of being adored as the dustman is."

It's as earthy and beautiful an expression of the paradise of carnal passion as Joyce's pages in Ulysses about Bloom looking at Gertie.

Whoever thought to put Spencer into the Paradise exhibit got it right. In ancient times death in the Golden Age was always incorporated into life as a sensate pleasure, followed immediately by an improved life, the way most folks including all those flocking to the show in Bristol and Newcastle would like it. In those earlier times they had Saturnalia which meant not so much drunken sex sprees as subversion of the conventional moral order.

In the pre-spring festival senators and slave owners would put aside their stately togas and kindred marks of rank and don shapeless garments known as syntheses (the dialectic made cloth). The prime metaphor of the Saturnalia was freedom from all bondage ­ the bondage of poverty, of wealth, of the laws and, above all, time. Slaves set up a mock king and were served delicious fare by their masters. Such delicacies, given to the powerless by the powerful, were called "second tables", because temporarily, at the level of palpable fantasy, the tables were turned. Each household became a mimic republic, in which slaves held first rank. The law courts were closed. Gifts were exchanged. The Lords of Misrule reigned.
Thus it was with the Recall.

Welcome to Arnold, mock king for a day or two. Enough Californians wanted to turn the tables on you, Governor Davis, and this meant setting the pasteboard crown on Arnold's heads, they said, So be it.

Weekend Edition Features for Sept. 26 / 28, 2003

Tim Wise
The Other Race Card: Rush and the Politics of White Resentment

Peter Linebaugh
Rhymsters and Revolutionaries: Joe Hill and the IWW

Gary Leupp
Occupation as Rape-Marriage

Bruce Jackson
Addio Alle Armi

David Krieger
A Nuclear 9/11?

Ray McGovern
L'Affaire Wilsons: Wives are Now "Fair Game" in Bush's War on Whistleblowers

Col. Dan Smith
Why Saddam Didn't Come Clean

Mickey Z.
In Our Own Image: Teaching Iraq How to Deal with Protest

Roger Burbach
Bush Ideologues v. Big Oil in Iraq

John Chuckman
Wesley Clark is Not Cincinnatus

William S. Lind
Versailles on the Potomac

Glen T. Martin
The Corruptions of Patriotism

Anat Yisraeli
Bereavement as Israeli Ethos

Wayne Madsen
Can the Republicans Get Much Worse? Sure, They Can

M. Junaid Alam
The Racism Barrier

William Benzon
Scorsese's Blues

Adam Engel
The Great American Writing Contest

Poets' Basement
McNeill, Albert, Guthrie

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