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Ted Rall

Eliot Spitzer (cont.)
posted by Susan Stark

When I wrote my previous blog about prostitution and Eliot Spitzer (Prostitution Should Be Legalized), I wasn’t fully aware of everything that Spitzer did wrong, such as the money laundering, etc., because the full revelations of his activities hadn’t come out yet. I do not approve of these kinds of activities.

But, still, when it’s all said and done, Bush and his gang are guilty of high crimes against humanity (invasion of a country without legitimate cause), and approximately 1 million people have died as a result. And they have squandered more money than we can comprehend. The cost of Bush’s war will be estimated to a high of 3 trillion dollars, and I’m sorry, but, that is way too much money to spend so that conservatives can achieve their nebulous feelings of “safety”.

The Bush gang gets off the hook, while Eliot goes down for much pettier crimes.

Still, my position that Spitzer should be able to solicit prostitution if he wishes still stands, and that Kristen/Ashley should have to right to provide those services. Period. They are both consenting adults. The only kinds of prostitution that should be illegal are the ones that involve under-age persons, or persons being forced to work against their own will. The former is child molestation, and the latter is slavery.

This is the position that most sex-workers advocate, and it is certainly healthier than the positions taken by neurotic soccer-moms posing as “reformers” and “experts”. And that includes the male soccer-moms.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Eco-Terrorism: There’s No Such Thing

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Ted Rall

Property Rights Extremists Equate McMansions to 9/11 Victims

The United States should not build housing. Whole neighborhoods in places like Chicago and Dayton and Oakland and Newark and Memphis are dominated by abandoned houses and apartment buildings. Ten percent of our national housing stock–more than 13 million homes, enough to put roofs over the homeless three times over–are vacant year-round. So why do we let developers bulldoze fields and forests to put up soulless monstrosities?

Several “model houses” at a development bearing the typically atrocious name of “Quinn’s Crossing at Yarrowbay Communities” at the edge of Seattle’s creeping suburban sprawl went up in flames, apparently torched by radical environmentalists. I had two reactions. First, I was reminded of my wonder that such things happen so infrequently.

Then I laughed. I wasn’t alone. Time magazine bemoaned “a notable lack of sympathy for the fate of the homes” among residents of Washington state.

Quinn’s Crossing, says its website, was “dedicated to the ethos of putting the earth first.” In this case, putting Mother Earth “first” led the developers to construct “energy efficient” 4,500-square-feet McMansions. “The houses are out in the middle of nowhere, on land that used to be occupied by beaver dams and environmentally sensitive wetlands; the site sits at the headwaters of Bear Creek, where endangered chinook salmon spawn,” reported Erica C. Barnett for the Seattle weekly newspaper The Stranger. “The houses, and their polluting septic systems, also sit atop an aquifer, which provides drinking water for the area’s Cross Valley Water District.”

4,500 square feet? My last Manhattan apartment had 725. Visitors (New Yorkers, most of whom live in even tighter quarters) cooed over how big it was. The house in which I grew up had 1,000; it was designed for a nuclear family of four.

What galled ELF was the developers’ attempt to pass off self-indulgent, gargantuan McMansions as ecologically friendly. “The builders heavily promoted the ‘built green’ concept and pointed out that the homes were smaller than the 10,000-square-foot houses on previous Street of Dreams tours,” reported The Los Angeles Times.

Barnett’s story asked: “Were the Terrorists Right?” She noted: “An energy-efficient mansion will never use less energy than even a large urban apartment.”

Right or wrong, they’re not terrorists.

The feds say they are. They call Earth Liberation Front, the loose-knit “group” that took responsibility for the blazes in unincorporated Snohomish County, the biggest threat to mom, freedom, apple pie and three-minute pop songs since the Soviet Union closed shop. Six months before 9/11, shortly before the famous “Bin Laden Wants to Kick Our Ass Six Ways to Sunday” memo, the FBI went so far as to list the ELF as a federally designated terrorist organization. Like Al Qaeda.

Terrorism–you can look it up–involves killing people. Hijacking a plane and flying it into a building is terrorism. Destroying property–property that, for the most part, made the world a worse place–is not.

ELF’s goal of “inflict[ing] maximum economic damage on those profiting from the destruction and exploitation of the natural environment” has inspired people to set fire to SUVs at a New Mexico car dealership, Hummers in California, and a Vail ski lodge whose construction threatened the lynx, an endangered species. Damage to the Colorado ski project amounted to $12 million.

ELF members are vandals. They’re arsonists. But they aren’t terrorists.

ELF demands that its adherents “take all necessary precautions against harming any animal–human and non-human.” Although it could happen someday, no one has ever been killed or hurt in an ELF action. Equating the burning of a Hummer to blowing up a child exposes our society’s grotesque overemphasis on the “right” of property owners to do whatever they want. The word “eco-terrorism” is an insult to the human victims of real terrorism, including those of 9/11.

The closest ELF’s critics come to landing a punch is pointing out that fires send crud into the atmosphere. “This is releasing more carbon into the air than they ever would have by building the houses,” the listing agent for one of the destroyed “rural cluster development” houses told The New York Times. Newsweek asked: “If their cause is to save the environment, how does burning houses, and thereby releasing carbon and toxins into the atmosphere, help achieve that goal?”

Eye-roll alert: A house fire releases air pollution once. A family living in a house does it day after day for decades. Anyway, why are builders making houses out of toxins?

Property rights extremists raised the same point after ELF set fire to 20 Hummer H2s at a California car dealership in 2004. “There’s a lot more pollutants from the fire than the vehicles would pollute during their lifetime,” said the West Covina fire marshal. Even if that were true, he forgot where those gas guzzlers would have eventually ended up: in landfills, their nasty chemicals seeping into the ground.

“Think of all the resources those fires wasted,” moaned Seattle Times columnist Jerry Large. He explained that lawful means–petitions, politely worded letters to the editor, speaking at public hearings–are the proper way to take a stand against the destruction of the environment. “The development where this latest arson took place, situated atop the area’s water supply, has been challenged by other groups, using negotiation and the law,” he says approvingly. That’s true. The local zoning board heard from hundreds of opponents of Quinn’s Crossing before voting, 4 to 1, in favor.

Challenged, yes. But not successfully.

(Ted Rall is the author of the book “Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?,” an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America’s next big foreign policy challenge.)

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

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Ted Rall

Prostitution Should Be Legalized
posted by Susan Stark

You can lie the American people into a war, you can spend billions of dollars of taxpayers money on that war, you can kidnap people off the street and ship them to an Air Force base on foreign soil, and get away with it.

But God help you if you pay money for a little booty.

New York governor Eliot Spitzer, I am told, is in hot water over an escort he paid for for $4300.

And my response is: Is that all? The Iraq War costs $275 million a day, and Eliot paid $4300 for three hours.

You do the math.

In New York City, the escorting business, along with gentlemen’s clubs and massage parlors, brings in billions of dollars a year. That’s alot more than George Bush ever gave to this city.

And if Eliot Spitzer wishes to come to this city and contribute $4300, he should be able to do so without it costing his job. He is a consenting adult, and escort that he paid was a consenting adult. And if that $4300 was taxpayer money, so what? At least he put it into the local economy instead of flushing billions down the toilet in Iraq.

And if anybody else wishes to come to this city (or anywhere else) and pay for an escort, a stripper, or a masseuse, they should be able to do so legally. And anyone who wishes to provide such services should be legally allowed to do so, as long as they’re an adult.

We need to get rid of this hypocrisy surrounding prostitution, especially when we live in a world where dropping a cluster bomb on innocent civilians is considered “regrettable”.

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Ted Rall

THIS WEEK’S SYNDICATED COLUMN: ECO-TERRORISM? THERE’S NO SUCH THING

Property Rights Extremists Equate McMansions to 9/11 Victims

The United States should not build housing. Whole neighborhoods in places like Chicago and Dayton and Oakland and Newark and Memphis are dominated by abandoned houses and apartment buildings. Ten percent of our national housing stock–more than 13 million homes, enough to put roofs over the homeless three times over–are vacant year-round. So why do we let developers bulldoze fields and forests to put up soulless monstrosities?

Several “model houses” at a development bearing the typically atrocious name of “Quinn’s Crossing at Yarrowbay Communities” at the edge of Seattle’s creeping suburban sprawl went up in flames, apparently torched by radical environmentalists. I had two reactions. First, I was reminded of my wonder that such things happen so infrequently.

Then I laughed. I wasn’t alone. Time magazine bemoaned “a notable lack of sympathy for the fate of the homes” among residents of Washington state.

Quinn’s Crossing, says its website, was “dedicated to the ethos of putting the earth first.” In this case, putting Mother Earth “first” led the developers to construct “energy efficient” 4,500-square-feet McMansions. “The houses are out in the middle of nowhere, on land that used to be occupied by beaver dams and environmentally sensitive wetlands; the site sits at the headwaters of Bear Creek, where endangered chinook salmon spawn,” reported Erica C. Barnett for the Seattle weekly newspaper The Stranger. “The houses, and their polluting septic systems, also sit atop an aquifer, which provides drinking water for the area’s Cross Valley Water District.”

4,500 square feet? My last Manhattan apartment had 725. Visitors (New Yorkers, most of whom live in even tighter quarters) cooed over how big it was. The house in which I grew up had 1,000; it was designed for a nuclear family of four.

What galled ELF was the developers’ attempt to pass off self-indulgent, gargantuan McMansions as ecologically friendly. “The builders heavily promoted the ‘built green’ concept and pointed out that the homes were smaller than the 10,000-square-foot houses on previous Street of Dreams tours,” reported The Los Angeles Times.

Barnett’s story asked: “Were the Terrorists Right?” She noted: “An energy-efficient mansion will never use less energy than even a large urban apartment.”

Right or wrong, they’re not terrorists.

The feds say they are. They call Earth Liberation Front, the loose-knit “group” that took responsibility for the blazes in unincorporated Snohomish County, the biggest threat to mom, freedom, apple pie and three-minute pop songs since the Soviet Union closed shop. Six months before 9/11, shortly before the famous “Bin Laden Wants to Kick Our Ass Six Ways to Sunday” memo, the FBI went so far as to list the ELF as a federally designated terrorist organization. Like Al Qaeda.

Terrorism–you can look it up–involves killing people. Hijacking a plane and flying it into a building is terrorism. Destroying property–property that, for the most part, made the world a worse place–is not.

ELF’s goal of “inflict[ing] maximum economic damage on those profiting from the destruction and exploitation of the natural environment” has inspired people to set fire to SUVs at a New Mexico car dealership, Hummers in California, and a Vail ski lodge whose construction threatened the lynx, an endangered species. Damage to the Colorado ski project amounted to $12 million.

ELF members are vandals. They’re arsonists. But they aren’t terrorists.

ELF demands that its adherents “take all necessary precautions against harming any animal–human and non-human.” Although it could happen someday, no one has ever been killed or hurt in an ELF action. Equating the burning of a Hummer to blowing up a child exposes our society’s grotesque overemphasis on the “right” of property owners to do whatever they want. The word “eco-terrorism” is an insult to the human victims of real terrorism, including those of 9/11.

The closest ELF’s critics come to landing a punch is pointing out that fires send crud into the atmosphere. “This is releasing more carbon into the air than they ever would have by building the houses,” the listing agent for one of the destroyed “rural cluster development” houses told The New York Times. Newsweek asked: “If their cause is to save the environment, how does burning houses, and thereby releasing carbon and toxins into the atmosphere, help achieve that goal?”

Eye-roll alert: A house fire releases air pollution once. A family living in a house does it day after day for decades. Anyway, why are builders making houses out of toxins?

Property rights extremists raised the same point after ELF set fire to 20 Hummer H2s at a California car dealership in 2004. “There’s a lot more pollutants from the fire than the vehicles would pollute during their lifetime,” said the West Covina fire marshal. Even if that were true, he forgot where those gas guzzlers would have eventually ended up: in landfills, their nasty chemicals seeping into the ground.

“Think of all the resources those fires wasted,” moaned Seattle Times columnist Jerry Large. He explained that lawful means–petitions, politely worded letters to the editor, speaking at public hearings–are the proper way to take a stand against the destruction of the environment. “The development where this latest arson took place, situated atop the area’s water supply, has been challenged by other groups, using negotiation and the law,” he says approvingly. That’s true. The local zoning board heard from hundreds of opponents of Quinn’s Crossing before voting, 4 to 1, in favor.

Challenged, yes. But not successfully.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

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Ted Rall

America’s Best Conservative Cartoonist…

…is Chuck Asay.

I’ve long admired Asay, an older cartoonist whose multi-panel approach presages modern cartooning and eschews retro styles in other ways as well, because of his mad editorial cartooning chops. His right-wing politics are beside the point. A good cartoonist is a good cartoonist, period.

Check out an interview with him here:

He also says nice things about me:

I also like and respect Ted Rall. He is a very thoughtful person with incredible gifts. He writes well and is passionate about ideas. We may disagree about ideas from time to time but I can think of no other person who I’d like to be locked up with if we should wind up in jail somewhere.

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

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Ted Rall

Ted Rall in News Story About Editorial Cartooning

There’s an article containing my quotes about the editorial cartooning profession by Medill Reports:

Rall and many modern political cartoonists have also moved away from the use of symbolism in their work, something that marked nearly all historical editorial cartoons. Typical images included the use of the donkey and the elephant to represent political parties.

“No more labels, no metaphors, no cheesy Uncle Sam’s crying. It’s dumb!” said Rall. “That imagery isn’t popular with readers. They don’t get it, they don’t relate to it.”

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Ted Rall

Hillary Clinton 3am Response on Youtube
posted by Susan Stark

I found this response to Hillary’s “3am” ad on Youtube:

President Hillary Clinton answers the phone….

HILLARY: Hello?
BUSH: This is your Secretary of Defense, former President Bush. The terrorists may be bulding a doomsday weapon. If we drop our nukes now, millions of people will die, but billions of people could be saved. This is the most important decision in all of human history. What are you going to do?
HILLARY: Oh dear… where’s Bill?
BUSH: He’s out playing golf.(long pause)
HILLARY: Well, we’ll have to wait until he gets back.

What is wrong with this response, besides the obvious sexism in it? It seems that since the end of the Cold War, we have regressed into an appalling lack of knowledge of what happens after a nuclear war. The radiation fallout would kill not just the intended target, but any place the wind would spread it to. And then there is nuclear winter, which would finish off more than the targeted millions. I learned this in high school when I was a teenager in the ’80s. What are they teaching kids in class these days? Anything???

The first babies born after the end of the Cold War are now turning 18, and are old enough to vote and start holding political office. How many of them know what happens after a nuclear bomb is dropped? Maybe the teachers today should order from Netflix a coupla movies called The Day After and Threads and show them in class. They scared the pants off of me when I saw them, and they’ll scare the pants off of any kid watching it today. Scary, but necessary.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Afghanistan—A War We Can’t Believe In

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Ted Rall

Why Obama’s Favorite War is Less Winnable Than Iraq

Five years after the Republicans got us into war against Iraq, Democrats want to double down on a war that’s even more unjustifiable and unwinnable–the one against Afghanistan.

By any measure, U.S. troops and their NATO allies are getting their asses kicked in the country that Reagan’s CIA station chief for Pakistan called “the graveyard of empires.” Afghanistan currently produces a record 93 percent of the world’s opium. Suicide bombers are killing more U.S.-aligned troops than ever. Stonings are back. The Taliban and their allies, “defeated” in 2001, control most of the country–and may recapture the capital of Kabul as early as this summer.

“So,” asks The New York Times, “has Afghanistan now become a bigger security threat to the United States than Iraq?” Barack Obama’s answer is yes. He spent last year parroting the DNC’s line that Bush “took his eye off the ball” in Afghanistan when we invaded Iraq. Thankfully, he abandoned that hoary sports metaphor. Iraq, he says now, “distracted us from the fight that needed to be fought in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda. They’re the ones who killed 3,000 Americans.”

Sorta. But not really.

Osama bin Laden bragged about ordering the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998, yet has repeatedly denied a direct role in 9/11. He’s probably telling the truth. The hijackers were mostly likely recruited by Islamic Jihad, which is based in Egypt. Saudis, including members of the royal family, financed the strikes against New York and Washington. Pakistani intelligence funded and supervised the camps where some of them trained.

Al Qaeda may have been peripherally involved in 9/11; its leadership certainly knew about the plot ahead of time. They may have fronted some of the expense money. But 9/11 wasn’t an Al Qaeda operation per se.

Afghanistan’s connection to 9/11 was tertiary. At the moment the first plane struck the South Tower of the World Trade Center, most of Al Qaeda’s camps and fighters were in Pakistan. As CBS News reported on January 29, 2002, Osama bin Laden was in a Pakistani military hospital in Rawalpindi on 9/11. The Taliban militia, which provided neither men nor money for the attacks, controlled 90 percent of the country.

It has long been an article of faith among Democrats that Afghanistan is the “good war,” a righteous campaign that could be won with more money and manpower. But the facts say otherwise. The U.S. Air Force rained more than a million pounds of bombs upon Afghanistan in 2007, mostly on innocent civilians. It’s twice as much as was dropped in Iraq–and equally ineffective.

Six years after the U.S. invasion of 2001, according to Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, the U.S./NATO occupation force has surged from 8,000 to 50,000. But the Americans are having no more luck against the Afghans than had the Brits or the Soviet Union. The U.S.-backed government of Hamid Karzai controls a mere 30 percent of Afghanistan, admits McConnell. (Regional analysts say in truth it is closer to 15 percent.) Most of the country belongs to the charming guys who gave us babes in burqas and exploding Buddhas: the Taliban and likeminded warlords.

“Afghanistan remains a failing state,” says a report by General James Jones, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander. “The United States and the international community have tried to win the struggle in Afghanistan with too few military forces and insufficient economic aid.”

If he becomes president, Obama says he’ll “ask more from our European allies” to win in Afghanistan. But he won’t get it. As The New York Times puts it: “Why help the United States in Afghanistan, the European logic goes, when America would be able to handle Afghanistan much more easily if its GIs weren’t bogged down in Iraq?”

Obama says he would send two more American combat brigades–between 3,000 and 8,000 troops. If 158,000 troops can’t subdue Iraq, how can 58,000 do the job in Afghanistan?

They can’t.

Afghanistan’s population is 19 percent larger than that of Iraq. Its area is 49 percent bigger, with infinitely rougher terrain. Obama’s proposed “surgelet” would result in troop strength of less than one sixth of the 400,000 dictated by official U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine for a nation the size of Afghanistan.

Afghans say spring could mark the beginning of the end of the United States’ first experiment in post-9/11 regime change. For more than a year, Taliban commanders have controlled the key Kabul-to-Kandahar highway. “On one convoy last year we were 40 vehicles and only 12 got through,” Sadat Khan, a 25-year-old truck driver explained to the UK Telegraph as he pointed to “roughly patched bullet holes in the cab of his truck.” Cops loyal to Karzai expect to be massacred. “Maybe we will lose 30 per cent of us this spring, maybe 60 per cent,” police commander Mohammad Farid told the paper. He’d already been shot.

The Taliban say they’ll retake Kabul this year and reestablish the Islamic fundamentalist government led by Mullah Omar. No one knows whether they’ll succeed. But they’ve already begun to strangle the city of Kabul. They’re destroying its nascent telecommunications infrastructure, driving out foreign NGOs and businesspeople with terrorist attacks, and cutting off access to the remaining highways. Talibs promise to continue to target NATO troops, betting that Canada and other members of the coalition will pull out under pressure from antiwar voters. Bogged down in Iraq, the U.S. won’t be able to send more soldiers to Afghanistan. Karzai’s puppet regime won’t last long.

If Obama is so eager to keep fighting Bush’s wars, he’d be smarter to focus on the more winnable of the two: Iraq.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

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Ted Rall

TED RALL COLUMN: HOPE YOU CAN’T VOTE FOR

Ralph Nader Appeals to Disenfranchised Liberals

“What,” editorializes U.S. News & World Report, “does Ralph Nader bring to the political dialogue this year? Answer: nothing except for his own inflated ego.” Dimestore psychoanalysis was the standard reaction to Nader’s third third-party presidential bid. “An ego-driven spoiler,” the Des Moines Register called him. “He seems to have a pretty high opinion of his own work,” jabbed Barack Obama.

You see, other politicians who seek the presidency are like the Dalai Lama, humble and self-effacing. Obama and Hillary? Two sweeties. Not an ounce of ego between them.

Even our former colonial masters put in their two pence. Nader’s “egotism and cult of left-wing purity has been an utter disaster for the values he affects to espouse,” railed the UK Independent. Nader’s values would fare better, apparently, were he to shut up and keep them to himself.

Is Ralph really a spoiler? To answer “yes,” you have to buy three assumptions:
First, that the two-party system is written in stone. But it’s not. There’s nothing in the Constitution about two parties, or about parties at all. (The Founding Fathers were dismayed when parties emerged around 1800.) Besides, the Democratic-Republican stranglehold ill serves a diverse population of 300 million. Because parliamentary democracies offer voters a wide selection of parties representing almost every conceivable ideology, voter turnout in Europe typically exceeds 80 percent. In the U.S., most registered voters stay home.

Assumption two: voters ought to vote strategically, i.e., for the lesser of two evils. Even for those who accept this curiously alienating concept, however, evil often comes in pairs. Most citizens think the U.S. has lost more than it has gained under NAFTA; neither Obama nor McCain want to repeal it. Most people want the U.S. out of Iraq; both men have repeatedly voted to prolong the war. How shall anti-NAFTA, antiwar voters divine which will prove least anathematic as president? Should they resort to a ouija board?

The third leg of the Nader=Spoiler tripod relies on a belief that opinions espoused by a small minority of a population are inherently worthless. But, as anyone who has successfully gambled on a business can attest, today’s fringe thinking becomes tomorrow’s conventional wisdom. After 9/11, nine percent of Americans thought George W. Bush was a lousy president. Seventy-two percent feel that way now. America’s greatest political achievements–emancipation, women’s suffrage, the 40-hour work week–were first espoused by tiny voting blocs led by figures on the political fringe.

But that’s not why Ralph says he’s running. His platform seeks to promote causes that are popular with an overwhelming majority of American voters, yet have been sidelined by the two major parties and their allies in the media.

Fifty-five percent of Americans believe that Bush deserves to be impeached, according to a November 2007 American Research Center poll. (Considering Iraq, Guantánamo, domestic surveillance and torture alone, it’s surprising the number isn’t higher.) But “impeachment is off the table,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced as the Democrats recaptured Congress in 2006, and they haven’t mentioned it since. America’s pro-impeachment majority obviously can’t expect Republicans to prosecute their own guy. Aside from most voters, only Ralph Nader wants impeachment proceedings against the “criminal recidivist regime of George Bush and Dick Cheney.”

So who are the fringe weirdoes: the out-of-touch media elite, or the guy who agrees with most of the people?

The two remaining major Democratic presidential contenders think that repeatedly name-checking John Edwards is sufficient to draw votes from his liberal Democratic supporters. But liberals “don’t like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama–for them, he sold out even before he was bought in,” the Independent mocks. Only Nader offers “left-wing purity.”

And what’s wrong with that?

While McCain, Obama and Clinton repeatedly vote for funding the Iraq War, at the same time calling for expanding the war against Afghanistan–a doomed effort that was lost years ago–Nader wants to slash defense spending, the number-one cause of our skyrocketing federal deficit.

Americans favor “socialized medicine” (43 to 38 percent, says the February 14th Harris poll); only Nader agrees with them. Nader would repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, which destroyed labor unions; the other candidates haven’t said squat about the single biggest reason real wages are shrinking.

What’s wrong with that, say Democratic Party officials, is that Nader’s first run attracted 2.7 percent of the vote in 2000. Nader drew support from liberals who didn’t think Al Gore had enough “left-wing purity.”

“This time I hope it doesn’t hurt anyone,” said Hillary. Nader “prevented Al Gore from being the ‘greenest’ president we could have had.”

Maybe the Dems and their pundit pals ought to get their story straight. If Nader’s “left-wing purity” is so fringe and wacky, how can he hurt them?

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

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