A homeowner in Missouri put up a Halloween display on their front yard (visible even to motorists going by on interstate I-55) that consisted of a robed and hooded Ku Klux Klan figure standing next to an effigy of a black man hanging from a noose. He seemed to feel that his display showed “white pride”.

What is disturbing about this is not that some people have such attitudes. We surely know that such people exist and will always be among us. What is disturbing is that it is a throwback to an undesirable past when ugly manifestations of racism were blatant and overt. If such incidents start to become more common, it will not reflect well on the political climate that is developing in this country.

As anticipated, Wikileaks has released over 400,000 new secret documents, this time on the Iraq war. The Guardian report on the leaks says that it has new revelations of deaths and abuses of Iraqis.

As predicted, the anti-Wikileaks propaganda has begun, with the Pentagon saying: “This security breach could very well get our troops and those they are fighting with killed. Our enemies will mine this information looking for insights into how we operate, cultivate sources and react in combat situations, even the capability of our equipment.”

We should bear in mind that similar alarms raised after the previous leaks proved to be highly overblown.

Juan Cole describes what is going on in the occupied territories as Israeli settlers set fire to girls schools and mosques, destroy olive groves, take over land, and dump their sewage on Palestinian vineyards, all in the effort to force Palestinians out.

In an article titled It’s the Occupation, Stupid, Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, who has been studying terrorism in many countries for a long time, says that the argument that we hear that terrorists hate us for who we are and what we represent, as formulated bt then president George W. Bush that “They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other” is simply not true.

New research provides strong evidence that suicide terrorism such as that of 9/11 is particularly sensitive to foreign military occupation, and not Islamic fundamentalism or any ideology independent of this crucial circumstance. Although this pattern began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s, a wealth of new data presents a powerful picture.

More than 95 percent of all suicide attacks are in response to foreign occupation, according to extensive research that we conducted at the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Terrorism, where we examined every one of the over 2,200 suicide attacks across the world from 1980 to the present day.
…
Intelligent decisions require putting all the facts before us and considering new approaches. The first step is recognizing that occupations in the Muslim world don’t make Americans any safer — in fact, they are at the heart of the problem.

Cartoonist Ted Rall explains the baffling phenomenon of poor people being so protective of the interests of the very rich, at a time the rich don’t seem to give a damn about the poor.

The US government is bracing for a fresh release of WikiLeaks documents that is likely to occur soon. When it happens, we will once again be deluged with claims that WikiLeaks has both damaged the war effort on the ground and put innocent people at risk.

Glenn Greenwald reminds us of that past propaganda and how it has proved to be false.

In this conversation with Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, writer Philip Dray reminds us of how much we owe trade unions for improving the working conditions of everyone.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Philip Dray

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Glenn Greenwald points to a study that further documents the steady collapse of the US from within. One indicator is life expectancy but Greenwald points to many others.

In 1950, the United States was fifth among the leading industrialized nations with respect to female life expectancy at birth, surpassed only by Sweden, Norway, Australia, and the Netherlands. The last available measure of female life expectancy had the United States ranked at forty-sixth in the world. As of September 23, 2010, the United States ranked forty-ninth for both male and female life expectancy combined.

The slide is quite rapid. In 1999, the US was 24th.

But not to worry. When it comes to incarcerating prisoners, selling arms, and starting cruel and unnecessary wars, we’re still #1! And we have risen to #5 in executions, just behind China, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Who would not want to be in such distinguished company?

Yes, believe it or not, a judge ordered a constitutional lawyer to jail because he refused to vocalize the Pledge of Allegiance, although he stood while others did so.

Judges do abuse the power they have in their courtrooms on occasion, treating it like their own private fiefdoms, but this is going too far. The Supreme Court ruled in 1943 that children could not be forced to recite the pledge but the judge thinks that adults can?

Glenn Greenwald provides further evidence of the country’s descent into one in which the rule of law and the constitution are treated as inconvenient irritants, to be ignored in the glorious and never-ending ‘war on terror’..