Looking at the world the last 10-15 years through the prism of Bin Laden and our deteriorating relationship with the Mideast, it's instructive to note a large failure by the Clinton team:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64828-2002Jun29

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2002/01/osama200201

Imagine John Adams, marked by the same man for hanging a decade earlier, for his role in the rebellion of the English colonies against the Crown. Yet now it was June, 1785 and he was presenting himself to King George III as the Ambassador of the United States to the Court of St. James. It is one of the most gripping scenes in David McCullough's magnificent book, and its dramatization in the television version was almost as good.

Ron Gould (Republican-AZ) will have to disarm when he goes to public events, sporting events, or enters libraries or government buildings in Arizona. Yes, he will have to leave his gun in his car, friends. Is this an outrage??  The Bill involved, dutifully passed by the Republican Legislature and sent to the Governor for her signature, has been vetoed.

            The Center for American Progress issued a fascinating and important PolicyLink paper early in April 2011: Prosperity 2050: Is Equity the Superior Growth Model?[1] Written by Sarah Treuhaft and David Madland, both its content and its title raised a central question of our time: whether it is “possible that the traditional assumption that there is a tradeoff between growth and equity is wrong, and that broadly shared growth is ultimately better for the economy?” The tentative Treuhaft/Madland answer to this question was that

When Harry Truman created the CIA in 1947 out of the Office of Strategic Services that had been formed during WW II to coordinate espionage activities against the Axis Powers, Truman wanted a civilian intelligence organization that would bring raw data to him as President, unadulterated by the bias that wouldn’t be “slanted to conform to established positions of a given department.”

It appears that the following year Congress expanded the role of the CIA to include "sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures...subversion [and] assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation movements, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world” [snip]  including “an active Black operations mission has been launched deep under cover into Bolivia.  (Wikipedia asks for citation for the expansion claim.)

By 1963 Truman expressed public dismay at the directions the CIA had evolved:

The next step for the Birther movement is an extreme one.

Crossposted at www.Kavehadel.com/blog

 Artwork 2011©KavehAdel.com

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: A Liberal Anthem for Our Time

President John F. Kennedy defined the American Liberal as  "... someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties" [cited by Eric Alterman, Why we're Liberals: a political handbook for post-Bush America, 2008]