Jul 18 2007
Cyrano’s Journal Online, Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop are initiating a weekly email which will include links to both the most recent offerings and to timeless classics available on our very diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to
By Steven Jonas
7/18/07
In the famous Humphrey Bogart/Ingrid Bergman movie Casablanca, the character Captain Renault of the French police is famously played by Claude Rains. Upon walking into Rick’s (the Humphrey Bogart character) bar near the beginning of the movie, he famously says: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!” And so, the reaction among many on all sides of the political spectrum to the Libby commutation has been: “shocked, shocked” to find that it has happened.
How could Bush do this? After all, he has always been so strict on the question of commutations, and pardons too. It is so obviously political, or a payback, or a payoff, or a cover-up, or a bone for his “conservative” base, or he is reaching out at least halfway to Sean Hannity (who is saying that well, it’s OK, but now Bush should really go and do the right [in both senses, I guess] thing and pardon the guy.”) Yes, it is obviously most of those things and probably all of them.
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Jul 17 2007
Cyrano’s Journal Online, Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop are initiating a weekly email which will include links to both the most recent offerings and to timeless classics available on our very diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to
By Ed Ciaccio
7/14/07
“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper”
—-“The Hollow Men” - T.S. Eliot
“Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.”
–Hannah Arendt
“At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is ‘not done.’ Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.”
–George Orwell
‘We face a dire reality. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue with no end in sight. A nuclear strike on Iran may occur at any moment, based on a “false flag” terrorist attack to be blamed on Iran, as noted by Brzezinski and others. The neoconservative mania of the White House breeds war and hatred abroad. Secret prisons and torture have become routine.”
–Cindy Sheehan, July 4, 2007
Among the many rare species endangered by the Cheney/Bush regime over the last six years, too often with the complicity not only of Congressional Republicans, but many Democrats as well, is one which too many of us take for granted: our Constitutional system.
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Jul 16 2007
Cyrano’s Journal Online, Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop are initiating a weekly email which will include links to the latest high quality content available on our very diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to
By Rand Clifford
7/16/07
Who are we? We’re the winners—America loves a winner. In America there are winners, and everybody else. Remember that old saying, “It’s not if you win or lose, it’s how you play the game”? Turns out that’s the motto for suckers, for losers. Winning is all that matters. Imagine if instead of glorifying lottery winners, the media paid homage to the losers? Be even more tedious than celebrity hijinks, eh, takes millions of losers to support one winner. Maybe that “how you play the game” motto is one reason you’ve lost your country, something to do with, perhaps, considering government a spectator sport. Remember the price of liberty being eternal vigilance? We know, that’s so history. One might think Americans are real history buffs; after all, the standard defense for having hundreds of moronic television channels remains: “There are good things, like the History Channel.” Well, for all of you spectators that actually watch the History Channel, instead of merely crowing about it, we’ve peppered it with propaganda, so the joke’s on you. Something else you might’ve snoozed away is the crucial truth: “He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.” (George Orwell, from 1984)
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Jul 10 2007
Cyrano’s Journal Online, Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop are initiating a weekly email which will include links to both the most recent offerings and to timeless classics available on our very diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to
By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
6/27/07
George W. Bush!?! The Most Successful American President?!? “How can you, Steve Jonas, give him that appellation,” you might ask? “Awhile back didn’t you say that he was the ‘Worst American President?’ ” And I would say, “indeed I did, but one thing has nothing to do with the other. In fact, I began my TPJ column of Sept. 14, 2006 with the following text (edited slightly here):”
“George Bush is the worst President the United States has ever had. Notice that I did not use the word ‘arguably.’ He is simply is. For one reason. He is the first President ever to have as his primary goal the destruction of the Constitutional, Democratic, system under which he took power (notice that I did not say ‘elected’), and under which our country has been successfully governed in the 215-plus years since its founding. This is for him the absolutely primary goal. For the nation as a whole his achievement of it would obviously be an unmitigated disaster.
“There have been, to be sure, other bad Presidents. Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan essentially stood by as the nation slid towards civil war. Andrew Johnson established the basis for what became the South’s long-term victory in that Civil War in every element other than preserving the legal institution of slavery (see my column, “How the South Won the (1st US) Civil War,” Sunday, November 06, 2005, at http://www.planetarymovement.org/ [archive] ).
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