"God wants America to lead world;" Mitt Romney..dangerous chest-thumping!

By Bruce Smith and Steve Peoples, Associated Press in Toronto Star, October 7, 2011
“This century must be an American century. In an American century, America has the strongest economy and the strongest military in the world,” Romney says. “God did not create this country to be a nation of followers. America is not destined to be one of several equally balanced global powers. America must lead the world, or someone else will.”

While Romney served as a Mormon missionary in France more than four decades ago, he has limited foreign policy experience. As he says in nearly every campaign stop, he has spent the majority of his life in the business world. But Romney has been critical of Obama’s foreign policy, particularly the president’s aggressive timeline to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.
At a campaign stop in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, on Thursday, Romney previewed some of the themes for Friday’s speech. He called for 100,000 new troops, increased military spending and a larger Navy.
“You would think that the president and the people in Washington would recognize the importance of the United States military and the need not to shrink our military budget but strengthen it,” Romney told veterans on the hangar deck of the World War II-era aircraft carrier USS Yorktown.
If there is, or ought to be, a sure-fire formula for imploding a presidential campaign, it has to be telling the voters that a candidate "knows the intention and mind of God."
It has been a tradition as old as human history that politicians and military leaders have invoked God's decision and power to accompany their mission. "God is on our side!" is a rallying cry for much of human history. And, there is literally no evidence of the truth of that rhetoric.
Not only that, but especially to tell voters that a strong military is "God's purpose" is much more than a step too far. It is a kind of clinging to a desperate hope of past military, political, economic and intellectual prowess, even, it could be argued, testosterone, in comparison with the rest of the world.
Further, there is a kind of arrogance in the statement that begs the question, "Is this man even fit to be president?"
Wrapping oneself in self-manufactured sanctimony is akin to telling the rest of the people, including especially those against whom one is competing, "I am closer to God, and have a special "line of communication with God" that the rest of the world does not have. It is not only sheer poppy-cock; it is extremely dangerous.
It sets up the spectre that someone else, somewhere else, will respond, in opposition, that "God is on OUR side" and that is precisely the kind of conflict from which there is no escape.
Now, whoever considers him/herself a warrior in those two camps, is fighting a "holy war" (with God as the Commander in Chief, the chief intelligence officer, the ultimate controller)....and that could be a description of much of the last decade, given the radical Islamists' claim that "Allah" is calling for jihad against the west, especially against America.
I recall an inscription over the front door of a theology seminar, Huron College, part of the University of Western Ontario, that read  "True Religion and Sound Learning"....as if the Anglican church had a monopoly on God's intentions for his people.
As a student at that college, studying ministry, I, along with many of my classmates, was appalled at the presumption and the arrogance of the claim. The meaning for many of us was then, and continues to be, echoed in the recent Romney rant, that the Anglican church was the "true religion."  Of course, the Roman Catholic church has held, publicly, that they are the only true Christian religion, and that all others, especially protestants, have strayed from the "right" path, and will abandon their apostasy by returning to the discipline, rule, dogma and tradition espoused and enforced by the Vatican. It is just as much an over-reach for the Romans as it is for the Anglicans, and as it is for Romney, coming as he does from the Mormon church.
If one even catches a glimpse of the grace of God, one is held in awe by such an experience and cannot even approach "knowing" the mind and the intent of God, in the retelling of the experience. Such an experience does not and cannot imbue its recipient with "special knowledge of God's intentions;" it merely (and ironically) exposes him/her to the transformative and unusual and overwhelming gift of that grace.
Even building cathedrals, often described as testaments to man's gratitude for the gifts of God, reaching "to heaven" as many of them aspire to do, is, like the compositions of many of music's great talents, dedicated to God, without claiming to encapsulate the "true" faith.
Only the Jewish faith, at least from my limited reading, escapes the trap of "knowing the mind of God" and admits to such humility, yet pursues with vigour in both informal and formal dialectics, various possible interpretations, as a discipline that, they believe, brings them closer to the imponderable, the inexplicable and the awesome nature of God and God's will. They even recommend some 613 "life rules" for the descendants of their "tribe."
Romney's grasping for the triumphal "God's purpose" for the American people, especially in the current context of world affairs, tarnishes his bid, and his name and his potential for fulfilling the presidential role, even though the media will not treat his "helium" theology as off-limits, so depraved does the U.S. feel right now, that many of their people are also "grasping at straws" in an effort to restore their confidence in themselves, by invoking God's confidence in them. It is a slippery slope, and Romney has deliberately and dangerously chosen to follow it.

PSA test gets a "D" from U.S. Task Force

By Elizabeth Cohen, CNN website, October 6, 2011
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, the group that told women in their 40s that they don't need mammograms, will soon recommend that men not get screened for prostate cancer, according to a source privy to the task force deliberations.

The task force is set to recommend a "D" rating for prostate specific antigen, or PSA, testing. Such a rating means "there is moderate or high certainty that the service has no net benefit or that the harms outweigh the benefits," according to the group's website. The task force is set to propose this recommendation Tuesday, and then allow for a comment period before issuing a final recommendation.
According to a draft copy of a report scheduled to be released Monday, a review of studies shows screening with the PSA blood test results in "small or no reduction" in prostate cancer deaths.
The report adds that PSA testing is "associated with harms related to subsequent evaluation and treatments."
The PSA test, which is sometimes accompanied by a digital rectal exam, can help determine if a man has prostate cancer. The problem is that many of the cancers that get detected are so small and slow-growing, they'll never be harmful, and doctors have a difficult time discerning the quick, harmful cancers from the slow, harmless ones.
If you test 100 men over age 50, 17 of them will have prostate cancer, and only three of those will have a fast-growing cancer and die of the disease, according to Dr. Kenneth Lin, senior author of the paper due to be released Monday.
If the 14 men with the slow-growing cancers are treated, they could be rendered impotent or incontinent from the treatment; or worse, the treatment could kill them. About one in 500 men who has a radical prostatectomy will die because of complications of the surgery, according to Lin.
Some prostate cancer patients were disappointed with the task force's decision.
A spokesman for the Prostate Cancer Foundation called the proposed recommendation "a tremendous mistake."
"You're talking to someone whose life was saved by [the PSA test]," Dan Zenka said.
Being unable to discern the fast-growing from the slow-growing cancers is a serious problem, especially for a medical profession that wants to intervene to "make it better". Potentially being rendered impotent or incontinent by the treatment is also a serious problem. Sometimes, perhaps rarely, not knowing the results of a test like the PSA, can be a positive form of denial, since not knowing permits the patient to continue life as he has known it, if and until some of the ambiguity and uncertainty and potentially negative "side-effects" are reduced or eliminated.
Another issue this report points to is the "relative" stature of most medicine. It is a process of continuous discovery, some of the new discoveries supplanting old practices, leaving many patients confused, uncertain and sceptical of not only "first opinions" but also of some invasive treatments.
However, healthy scepticism in patients requires relatively easy access to "second opinions" and, at least in Canada, accessing those second opinions is not always easy. I recall a conversation my then spouse had with an otolaryngologist, following a surgery he performed on our then three-year-old daughter, including a mastoidectomy, a very rare procedure in the mid-seventies. She simply asked, "Could our daughter be suffering from allergies?"
The doctor snapped, "We treat ears here! and dismissed the legitimate inquiry. Only after pleading with our family doctor did we secure a referral to Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto, where, indeed, multiple allergies were found, and treated. Today that daughter is a healthy forty-something, fully engaged in teaching high school students in her second language.
When I confronted that same family doctor about the risks of the PSA, and my refusal to undergo the test, in 2001, he was shocked, and even a little dismayed that I would question the test. My reading included evidence from medical experts about the relative risks involved, and we had to agree to disagree.
There are indeed times when the medical profession does not know what to do with information it may have gathered from some of its diagnostic procedures, and the patient, finally, is the arbiter of what procedures are performed on his/her body. And just like ensuring that the civilians are always in charge of the military, so should the patient be the final decision-maker in the maze of recommended options from the medical fraternity.
And when the evidence of over-prescribing medications whose side-effects seem to outweigh the benefits, one has to wonder if moderation in medicine would not be an advancement that both the profession and it clients would do well to incorporate into the training.

Denial of Jewish people/state/religion/history greatest obstacle to peace

By Yossi Klein Halevi, Globe and Mail, October 6, 2011
Yossi Klein Halevi is a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and a contributing editor of The New Republic.

In the current atmosphere, the Israeli demand that Palestinians recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state has assumed a new urgency. On the face of it, that expectation should hardly pose a dilemma for Palestinian leaders committed to peace. A two-state solution, after all, means that each state has the right to define itself by its majority culture.

Yet Mr. Abbas, along with other Palestinian leaders, insists he will never accept a Jewish state. In opposing the right of the Jewish people to self-determination, Palestinian leaders have exposed the real obstacle to Middle East peace: not the creation of a Palestinian state, which most Israelis support, but the existence of a Jewish state, which most Palestinians reject.
The root of Palestinian rejectionism is the perception – widespread in the Arab world – that the Jews are not a nation at all but a religion. After all, many Arabs argue, the Jews lived for centuries as a religious minority under Islamic rule. Only in the 20th century did they reinvent themselves as a nation.
In fact, the Jews perceived their exile as a temporary aberration, and never stopped dreaming of renewed sovereignty in their homeland. Since ancient times, Jews have identified themselves as a people practising a particular faith. The centrality of peoplehood in Judaism even allows the seeming anomaly of Jewish atheists, so long as they identify with Jewish history and values.
The Arab world’s insistence on defining the Jews out of their own national identity isn’t only insulting: It prolongs the conflict by encouraging rejection of Israel’s legitimacy.
If the Jews have contrived their national identity, what, then, is the meaning of their history and attachment to their homeland? The Palestinian solution is to turn Jewish history, too, into a lie. Palestinian media routinely dismiss the Jewish narrative: There was no ancient Jewish presence in the land of Israel, there was no temple on the Temple Mount, and the Holocaust has been exaggerated or entirely invented.
The denial of Jewish history and identity – widespread in the Arab world – is ultimately the greatest threat to peace. Settlements can be dismantled, as Israel proved during its withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. But an insidious educational process of delegitimizing the other can’t so easily be uprooted.
The fear of another has many roots. However, one of the most threatening experiences is to have one's truth, one's experience, and therefore one's identity threatened by the beliefs, attitudes and actions of another.
I recall a conversation, after years of separation, with a former supervisor who, when we worked together, had betrayed me in his dealings with other professional colleagues. I had called him out on his betrayal at the time, bitter and resentful as I was, I thought legitimately. Years later, after he had betrayed me again in a completely unprofessional reference, I confronted him, and reminded him of his earlier betrayal. His response was an unequivocal, "It never happened!"
To which comment, I immediately climbed into my vehicle, and drove away, as he banged on the driver's door window, desperate to continue a pointless conversation. We were and are of the same Caucasian ethnicity, both raised protestants, both affiliated with the same political party, and both allegedly proud Canadians. However, the denial of my reality was and remains totally unacceptable, and irreconcilable. We will not likely encounter each other again unless and until the breach of denial and thereby legitimacy has been healed.
When a race of people, the Palestinians, the Arabs, are raised to believe that Israel is the enemy, that Israel is not a legitimate homeland for the Jewish people, that Israel must be blown off the map of the world, that the Holocaust never happened, that the Jewish people are a scourge to humanity....these are not like settlements, nor are they like missiles, nor are they like "religious differences". They are a denial of the legitimate existence of the Jewish people and the state of Israel. This belief, perception and attitude is one that it is the responsibility of the rest of the world to eliminate. It is not congruent with the facts of history; it is not congruent with the history of the Jewish people; it is not congruent with any attempt, now or in the future, to bring peace to the Middle East. It is not some technicality of the location of a boundary line between two autonomous states. It is an existential threat to the people of Israel, something no other state has to endure. And it is rooted in the culture, the religion and the history of the Palestinian and Muslim people. It is first and foremost the responsibility of the people of that culture and that religion and that history to eliminate such teachings from their "curricula" and from their conversations, and from their pulpits.
And if one state and one people are deemed illegitimate anywhere in the world, then how can the rest of the world be safe from a similar declaration. Put simply, we can't.
Consequently, it is the business of the world leaders, of the world's various organizations, of the various academic and cultural institutions everywhere to work to remove this lie, this distortion, this insidious threat from the consciousness of the world's people. And to state that is not pathological altruism. It is, in essence, a need of all people living on the planet. If one group of people is so anathema that its very existence as a people, and as a state, is the target of others for total annihilation, then when will it be "our" turn for a similar targeting?
This is not simply an Israeli problem, nor is it an American problem, nor is it a Christian problem, nor can it be reduced to a Middle East, or a Quartet problem. It is a cancer within the conversations everywhere between and among world leaders that can and will only grow, dependent as it is on the dark side of human nature, the Shadow, denied, unrecognized and unwrapped into public consciousness. Another potential gift is the unwrapping of a new and perhaps novel approach to life: that a people and their religion are inseparable, just as their history and their culture and their people are inseparable. And perhaps, once and for all, this bogeyman of the "separation of state and church" so sacred in the American context, can be finally removed from the consciousness of that nation.
There is another potential gift from the removal of this cancerous tumour. It is a full airing of a new and liberating TRUTH for all people: that the world can deal effectively with the agreed facts of our shared history. It was Senator Moynahan (D) from New York, who reminded his political adversaries that they were entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.
This is one singular instance when his poignant observation applies, and must be made to apply, by any and all those responsible for the future of the planet, and the race.
Denying the legitimacy of Israel and of the Jewish people simply does not fit with any picture of a world even working toward peace, without expecting its full accomplishment.
From Letters to the Editor, Globe and Mail, October 7, 2011
Any reasonable person would have at least two problems agreeing that Israel should be recognized as a “Jewish State.” (The Real Obstacle To Palestinian Statehood – Oct. 6): The first is what does that mean? There can be no difficulty advocating that Israel be recognized as a civil, democratic, pluralist state whose official religion is Judaism and whose population is majority Jewish.

But that is exactly not what Israel is demanding. Instead it appears to seek a recognition that, unlike every other democratic state, somehow its citizenship is defined by religion or ethnicity. Among other things, where does that leave the millions of non-Jewish inhabitants of Israel?
The second problem is what is meant by “Israel?” Could Mr. Halevi point out the boundaries on a map? He cannot, because among Israelis themselves are deeply divided over what, exactly, the boundaries should be. Indeed, the boundary issue is inseparable from the current dispute with the Palestinians.
So recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, far from being a reasonable request, is merely a political slogan to marshal international support.
Larry MacDonald, Victoria

Pathological altruism...very dangerous and ubiquitous

By Natalie Angier, New York Times, October 3, 2011
Some years ago, Dr. Robert A. Burton was the neurologist on call at a San Francisco hospital when a high-profile colleague from the oncology department asked him to perform a spinal tap on an elderly patient with advanced metastatic cancer. The patient had seemed a little fuzzy-headed that morning, and the oncologist wanted to check for meningitis or another infection that might be treatable with antibiotics.

Dr. Burton hesitated. Spinal taps are painful. The patient’s overall prognosis was beyond dire. Why go after an ancillary infection? But the oncologist, known for his uncompromising and aggressive approach to treatment, insisted.
“For him, there was no such thing as excessive,” Dr. Burton said in a telephone interview. “For him, there was always hope.”
On entering the patient’s room with spinal tap tray portentously agleam, Dr. Burton encountered the patient’s family members. They begged him not to proceed. The frail, bedridden patient begged him not to proceed. Dr. Burton conveyed their pleas to the oncologist, but the oncologist continued to lobby for a spinal tap, and the exhausted family finally gave in.
As Dr. Burton had feared, the procedure proved painful and difficult to administer. It revealed nothing of diagnostic importance. And it left the patient with a grinding spinal-tap headache that lasted for days, until the man fell into a coma and died of his malignancy.
Dr. Burton had admired his oncology colleague (now deceased), yet he also saw how the doctor’s zeal to heal could border on fanaticism, and how his determination to help his patients at all costs could perversely end up hurting them.
“If you’re supremely confident of your skills, and if you’re certain that what you’re doing is for the good of your patients,” he said, “it can be very difficult to know on your own when you’re veering into dangerous territory.”
The author of “On Being Certain” and the coming “A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind,” Dr. Burton is a contributor to a scholarly yet surprisingly sprightly volume called “Pathological Altruism,” to be published this fall by Oxford University Press. And he says his colleague’s behavior is a good example of that catchily contradictory term, just beginning to make the rounds through the psychological sciences.
As the new book makes clear, pathological altruism is not limited to showcase acts of self-sacrifice, like donating a kidney or a part of one’s liver to a total stranger. The book is the first comprehensive treatment of the idea that when ostensibly generous “how can I help you?” behavior is taken to extremes, misapplied or stridently rhapsodized, it can become unhelpful, unproductive and even destructive.
Selflessness gone awry may play a role in a broad variety of disorders, including anorexia and animal hoarding, women who put up with abusive partners and men who abide alcoholic ones.
Because a certain degree of selfless behavior is essential to the smooth performance of any human group, selflessness run amok can crop up in political contexts. It fosters the exhilarating sensation of righteous indignation, the belief in the purity of your team and your cause and the perfidiousness of all competing teams and causes.
David Brin, a physicist and science fiction writer, argues in one chapter that sanctimony can be as physically addictive as any recreational drug, and as destabilizing. “A relentless addiction to indignation may be one of the chief drivers of obstinate dogmatism,” he writes. “It may be the ultimate propellant behind the current ‘culture war.’ ” Not to mention an epidemic of blogorrhea, newspaper-induced hypertension and the use of a hot, steeped beverage as one’s political mascot.
Barbara Oakley, an associate professor of engineering at Oakland University in Michigan and an editor of the new volume, said in an interview that when she first began talking about its theme at medical or social science conferences, “people looked at me as though I’d just grown goat horns. They said, ‘But altruism by definition can never be pathological.’ ”
To Dr. Oakley, the resistance was telling. “It epitomized the idea ‘I know how to do the right thing, and when I decide to do the right thing it can never be called pathological,’ ” she said.
Indeed, the study of altruism, generosity and other affiliative behaviors has lately been quite fashionable in academia, partly as a counterweight to the harsher, selfish-gene renderings of Darwinism, and partly on the financing bounty of organizations like the John Templeton Foundation. Many researchers point out that human beings are a spectacularly cooperative species, far surpassing other animals in the willingness to work closely and amicably with non-kin. Our altruistic impulse, they say, is no mere crown jewel of humanity; it is the bedrock on which we stand.
The Christian church, at least much of it, is an incubator for "pathological altruism" and one of the most difficult skills to teach from  a pastoral perspective is the skill of asking the other, "What do you need from me?" There is a kind of  built-in automatic switch to "help" that triggers whenever one person, especially one professionally trained in medicine, or even trained in the discipline of selflessness finds another in need. Run amok, this energy literally drowns the "recipient" especially if and when the recipient is unwilling and unready.
Saint Benedict, one of the more progressive of the mendicants, reminds us never to do the work another needs to do and this is a guide that can be helpful in setting boundaries, those necessary limits to "intervention"....
We each have enough of our own "work" to do to heal from the many wounds, separations, losses, alienations and psychic injuries inflicted both overtly and covertly in our lives to keep us busy for the rest of our time on the planet. Reminding ourselves of that need to heal, and to do the work necessary to move in that direction can be another guiding reminder to attend to our own business, even when it would be so gratifying to inflict our help on another.
Just yesterday, as I coldly returned a "morning" to an unfriendly, cold, and arrogant man, he walked away laughing at me believing, I suppose, that I could not or did not hear his derision. He is derisive of everyone: the neighbour artist who "thinks her art is good" as he puts it,  the liberal whose is "soft" on hard power and the dog owner whose dog disturbs him with minimal whining while the owners are at work. Of course, I want to smack him verbally, if not physically. And of course, I am righteously indignant at his smirking, supercilious laughter.
However, that is his problem, not mine. And the less attention and energy I give to his childish insult, the less stress I put on my own psyche.
The neurologist's spinal tap was neither wanted nor needed; many of the interventions, "to help" are unsolicited, unwanted and consequently resented. It is when we ask for help, and are specific in our request, and that request goes unheard, from sources capable of assisting that we are most distressed. We have done our work; we have concluded that we cannot fix a situation alone; we have reached out for help to someone capable of helping. And when we receive a stone wall, a closed ear and door, a pocketed hand, instead of the hand-up we sought, we can be devastated.

Occupy Together grows worldwide? Hedges calls these people "our best"

By Verena Dobnik, Globe and Mail, October 2, 2011

The Occupy Wall Street demonstration started out last month with fewer than a dozen college students spending days and nights in Zuccotti Park. It has grown significantly, both in New York and elsewhere as people display their solidarity in similar protests.

Organizers in Toronto and several other Canadian cities say they plan to follow the New York example. Activists say they plan to converge on Toronto’s financial district on Saturday Oct. 15, and will wait to march on the streets until the Toronto Stock Exchange opens on the Monday. Other protests are also planned for Calgary, Victoria, Ottawa, Montreal, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, according to a website called Occupy Together.
Nearly 800 people say they plan to attend the Occupy Toronto event, according to its Facebook page. In Vancouver, more than 1,000 people have said on Facebook that they plan to occupy an area outside the Vancouver Art Gallery. Those attending have been asked to bring tents with them, and the group’s Facebook page says protesters will stay “as long as it takes.”
The Occupy Together website suggests similar events are being planned in Mexico, Australia, Tokyo, about a dozen European countries, and more than 40 U.S. states.
The arrests of more than 700 people on Saturday as thousands tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge seemed to pour oil on the rage of those who camped out overnight in Zuccotti Park, a private plaza off Broadway near Wall Street.
The growing, cross-country movement “signals a shift in consciousness,” said Jared Schy, a young man sitting squeezed between three others who participated in Saturday’s march from Manhattan’s Financial District to the bridge.
“We don’t care whether mainstream media covers this or people see us on television. What counts are the more than 30,000 viewers following our online live stream,” he said. “We heard from a lot of them, and they’re joining us now!”
The protest has drawn activists of diverse ages and occupations, including Jackie Fellner, a marketing manager from Westchester County.
“We’re not here to take down Wall Street,” she said. “It’s not poor against rich. It’s about big money dictating which politicians get elected and what programs get funded.”
On Sunday, a group of New York public school teachers sat in the plaza, including Denise Martinez of Brooklyn. Most students at her school live at or below the poverty level, and her classes are jammed with up to about 50 students.
“These are America’s future workers, and what’s trickling down to them are the problems – the unemployment, the crime,” she said. She blamed Wall Street for causing the country’s financial problems and said it needed to do more to solve them.
The New York protesters have spent most of their time in the plaza, sleeping on air mattresses, holding assemblies to discuss their goals and listening to speakers including filmmaker Michael Moore and Princeton University professor Cornel West.
How big this "movement" grows and how quickly will depend on the kind of media it generates. And that does not mean the traditional radio, television and newspaper "media". It means the "social media" because that is the new media that matters to these protesters. We have seen flash mobs around the world, some of them risking their lives to oppose dictatorial regimes. We have seen flash mobs around the world trashing whatever was in their path. Now, we are witnessing a truly grassroots movement of people whose bodies are their political statement, and whose lives are being shaped by their coming together at a critical time in the world.
And if, in fact, this movement grows around the many capitals of the world, and unites those 99% who feel dispossessed, and rightly so, the people in power in various capitals will be unable to stop or to resist the demands of that 99%, whatever they become.
Up to this point, they have not declared specific demands; they are meeting and talking and listening to various speakers in their "informal city-in-the-park"....and they will stay there as long as their bodies and their health and their political effectiveness endure. Nevertheless, it is clear that the "suits" will not retain power in the same "untouhable" manner as they have recently; and so it should be...after all they have squandered their elected power by acting in the best interests of the money that "bought" their elections.
I think one of the most telling moments in this movement will be the kind of reception it generates in cities like Bejing and Moscow, and Lahore and Mumbai, if it reaches into those cities and countries. Another telling indicator will be the names of the speakers permitted to address their number. For which Washington politician would not salivate at the opportunity to address numbers generated without cash, without promises and without expectations. Michael Moore, Cornel West...of course. But wait to see if and when Sarah Palin wades into their midst. Will they consider her part of the 1%? Will they consider all elected politicians part of the 1%? Will they even stop their own conversations long enough to listen to the 1% voices? Doubtful.
The unarmed "army" of nonviolence is, and has proven to be, one of the most powerful political instruments known throughout the world. The silent, persistent, non-violent protester has stopped wars, has brought politicians to their knees, has turned the tide of history in many instances and has now raised the red flag that says to the rich and powerful, STOP! ENOUGH!
And it is about time!

U.S. Liberal sees Herman Cain as dangerous canary-in-the-coalmine of Republican candidates for President

By Deborah White, from About.com website, US Liberal Politics, October 4, 2011
Herman Cain is a conservative's conservative who opposes a dizzying list of issues and rights: Muslim places of worship in our communities; gay rights; abortion except in rare circumstances; immigration reform; health care reform, and too many more to list here.

Media-savvy Cain speaks with commanding authority stemming from his experiences as Baptist pastor and TV and talk-radio personality. He also speaks with a extraordinarily confident certitude unseen since... well, Sarah Palin.
Herman Cain is in near-total agreement with the Tea Party on all issues. For that reason, Cain could prove a formidable competitor for the Republican presidential nomination, as Tea Partiers become more familiar with Rick Perry and Mitt Romney.
Competitors - Per polling, Herman Cain is running third for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, behind top competitors Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. The victor will run against President Barack Obama on November 6, 2012.
•Muslims - Herman Cain told an interviewer in 2011 that, if elected, he would not have Muslims in his administration because "There's this creeping attempt... to gradually ease Shariah Law, and the Muslim faith into our government. It does not belong in our government"

Per Wikipedia, "Cain opposed the building of an Islamic Center for a Muslim community at a site in Tennessee, claiming that it was 'an infringement and an abuse of our freedom of religion' and 'just another way to try to gradually sneak Shariah law into our laws'."
•Abortion - Cain has called for defunding Planned Parenthood. During his unsuccessful 2004 Senate race, Cain stated that abortion should only be permitted in cases of incest and rape.
•Gay Rights - Cain supports neither gay marriage nor civil unions for same-gender couples, and believes that "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" should be reinstated for the military.
•Health Care Reform - Cain made his political debut as a very effective and outspoken opponent of the Clinton administration's health care plan bill. He publicly decried the cost of health care reform to small businesses.
At a 2011 Republican debate, cancer-survivor Herman Cain claimed that he "would be dead" if "we had been on Obamacare." PolitiFact rated his statement FALSE, based on his arguments supporting this statement.
•Immigration Reform - Cain is a staunch opponent of immigration reform. Per Cain in 2006, "Our federal government's wink-and-nod policy toward illegal aliens and their employers encourages massive identity theft, document fraud and ruined financial standing for millions of Americans."
In 2011, Cain orated, "... the term 'comprehensive immigration reform' tossed around by liberals is simply code for 'do nothing' which becomes amnesty. There are 3 steps to solving our illegal immigration problem: securing the border; enforce the laws; promote the existing path to citizenship."
Cain has stated he cannot support Rick Perry for president because Perry supports giving in-state tuition breaks to children of illegal immigrants.
Clearly an extreme conservative makes those slightly less exteme seem "moderate" to an electorate desperate for answers to the nation's many problems. So, no declared candidate will do much damage to this candidate, preferring to let him glide along in second or third place, without the bounce or the dive of candidates like Romney and Perry.
Those who want to see president Obama re-elected would do well to pass the word along to their friends and neighbours about this man's positions, and the dangers of his candidacy. Clearly, no Republican agent or agency will colour him dangerous; after all, they are relying on the Tea Party to energize their vote and their formidable fundraising for 2012.

Hedges, Dionne, Starbucks...all weighing in on U.S. crisis

By Chris Hedges, from truthdig.com, September 29, 2011
There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.

To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal.
Choose. But choose fast. The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live in their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown out of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills and 45,000 die from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of masters and serfs.

The only word these corporations know is more. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies.
Who the hell cares? If the stocks of ExxonMobil or the coal industry or Goldman Sachs are high, life is good. Profit. Profit. Profit. That is what they chant behind those metal barricades. They have their fangs deep into your necks. If you do not shake them off very, very soon they will kill you. And they will kill the ecosystem, dooming your children and your children’s children. They are too stupid and too blind to see that they will perish with the rest of us. So either you rise up and supplant them, either you dismantle the corporate state, for a world of sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are frog-marched toward self-annihilation.

Those on the streets around Wall Street are the physical embodiment of hope. They know that hope has a cost, that it is not easy or comfortable, that it requires self-sacrifice and discomfort and finally faith. They sleep on concrete every night. Their clothes are soiled. They have eaten more bagels and peanut butter than they ever thought possible. They have tasted fear, been beaten, gone to jail, been blinded by pepper spray, cried, hugged each other, laughed, sung, talked too long in general assemblies, seen their chants drift upward to the office towers above them, wondered if it is worth it, if anyone cares, if they will win. But as long as they remain steadfast they point the way out of the corporate labyrinth. This is what it means to be alive. They are the best among us.
Click here to access OCCUPY TOGETHER, a hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St.
By E.J. Dionne, truthdig.com, October 2, 2011 (Dionne asks, "Can the Left stage a Tea Party?")
(But) the absence of a strong, organized left made it easier for conservatives to label Obama himself as a left-winger. His health care reform is remarkably conservative—yes, it did build on the ideas implemented in Massachusetts that Mitt Romney once bragged about. It was nothing close to the single-payer plan the left always preferred. His stimulus proposal was too small, not too large. His new Wall Street regulations were a long way from a complete overhaul of American capitalism. Yet Republicans swept the 2010 elections because they painted Obama and the Democrats as being far to the left of their actual achievements.

This week, progressives will highlight a new effort to pursue the road not taken at a conference convened by the Campaign for America’s Future that opens Monday. It is a cooperative venture with a large number of other organizations, notably the American Dream Movement led by Van Jones, a former Obama administration official who wants to show the country what a truly progressive agenda around jobs, health care and equality would look like. Jones freely acknowledges that “we can learn many important lessons from the recent achievements of the libertarian, populist right,” and says of the progressive left: “This is our ‘tea party’ moment—in a positive sense.”
What’s been missing in the Obama presidency is the productive interaction with outside groups that Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed with the labor movement and Lyndon B. Johnson with the civil rights movement. Both pushed FDR and LBJ in more progressive directions while also lending them support against their conservative adversaries.
The question for the left now, says Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future, is whether progressives can “establish independence and momentum” while also being able “to make a strategic voting choice.” The idea is not to pretend that Obama is as progressive as his core supporters want him to be, but to rally support to him nonetheless as the man standing between the country and the right wing.
A real left could usefully instruct Americans as to just how moderate the president they elected in 2008 is—and how far to the right conservatives have strayed.
E.J. Dionne’s e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

The frustration of millions of well qualified workers, recent graduates, coupled with millions of middle-aged workers who have seen their jobs evaporate, under a veil of economic terms like "out-sourcing" or "union-busting" or "globalization" or....is showing in the kind of instant "city" in a park near Wall Street, and in many other cities across the U.S. and potentially other countries like Canada as well.
The owner of Starbucks, Howard Shultz, the upscale latte chain is making a corporate attempt to address the situation by asking for a $5 donation from his customers to create a lending source for new entrepreneurs to fill a hole left by the large banks. It may seem like a drop in the bucket, given the size of the need, but it is a beginning.
From the Starbucks website, October 3, 2011 (posted by Howard Shultz)
Supporting thriving communities – inside our stores and in the neighborhoods where we live and work – is at the heart of our mission. And being a good neighbor has never been more important as the global economy continues to weather a painful and challenging period.

Here in the U.S., we are starting to help fuel the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship. Starbucks is teaming up with the Opportunity Finance Network® (OFN) to help create and sustain jobs through a program we are calling Create Jobs for USA, which will provide loans to underserved community businesses. The Create Jobs for USA program will be seeded with a $5 million contribution from the Starbucks Foundation.
On behalf of the Create Jobs for USA fund, Starbucks is introducing the “Indivisible” wristband in our U.S. stores and online starting Nov. 1 for donors who contribute $5 or more to OFN’s Create Jobs for USA fund. One hundred percent of donations go directly to OFN to provide grants to community development financial institutions for underserved community businesses committed to creating and sustaining jobs.
Together, we can create opportunity, inspire confidence and help build our collective economic future. To learn how you can get involved, please join us at createjobsforUSA.org.
ABC  NEWS is on an extended campaign to alert American consumers to "buy American" whenever they can, with some startling results, especially on U.S. campuses, where university administrators were embarrassed to learn that many of their so-called "welcoming kits" contain goods manufactured off-shore.
All the while these initiatives are happening, the Republican Party (read Tea Party) is holding the U.S. government hostage to their publicly stated pledge to "make Obama a one-term president." So successful have they been in their subversive politics that yesterday ABC released a poll indicating that 55% of Americans believe Obama will indeed be a one-term president, with only 37% believing he will gain a second term.
The stakes are very high, not only for the U.S. itself, but for the world economy. Retrenchment, failing to engage with the rest of the world community except with missiles, drones and military personnel, pledging to raise no taxes...and of course, enhancing both the death penalty and restrictions on abortion...these do not make a responsible, mature and innovative nation, taking its place as a leader on the current global stage.
Obama has some big choices to make: either to continue (what is now considered by many) "to pander" to the right, or to declare unequivocally his true colours as a Democrat and lead a movement to restore  the U.S. balance sheet to respectability, and the U.S. reputation among world leaders to a balanced, and an integral and supportive position where long-range thinking and policy development trump short-term political gamesmanship. And such a courageous purpose will include higher taxes on the wealthy individuals and corporations. The political crisis that is holding the U.S. economy hostage to the narrow, mean-spirited, and self-righteous political ambitions of a few power-hungry right-wing narcissists has to be ended. And only the White House can do anything conclusive to bring that about.
And while doing so, the Obama administration can and will be emboldened by the authentic energies of all of those disaffected citizens who know the Tea Party plans are a ticket to more "99% working for only 1%"....and that is not sustainable.