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AAM Wins Press Action’s Book of the Year Award

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Ted Rall

The Anti-American Manifesto has been named Press Action’s Book of the Year 2010:

Ted Rall’s The Anti-American Manifesto takes a serious look at how U.S. political and economic elites are pushing the planet and its inhabitants down a road to ruin. The book is a cry for Americans to stand up and show some courage against the leaders who steal their money to fight endless wars and destroy the Earth. Rall is a gifted writer. The Anti-American Manifesto is not a dense treatise on the evils of capitalism. Some reviewers have criticized Rall for not offering a clearer vision of what the United States would look like in the wake of the revolution that he believes the nation so desperately needs. But Rall explains the primary purpose of the book is to incite Americans to do whatever they can to dismantle the nation’s oppressive and destructive systems as soon as possible, with the full knowledge that there will be counter-revolutionaries, with great firepower, who will seek to fill the ensuing power vacuum. Rall apparently is writing a follow-up to the manifesto that may quiet some of his critics by outlining his vision for a sustainable and compassionate society.

East Hampton Star Reviews the Manifesto

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Ted Rall

There’s a good review of The Anti-American Manifesto in today’s East Hampton Star:

The extreme competence of the writing — with the exception of too many invectives — and the quality work put into the volume by the publisher indicates they both care. This message is all the more forceful in an era when the publishing industry generally does not care about the literary quality of what it publishes, only whether it will be profitable to the corporation that owns the publisher. Mr. Rall, you have influenced my thinking.

The author fears he may be arrested because of his views. If he is, I will help seek his freedom, but not with a gun or a brick, as he appears to recommend. I don’t agree with all he’s said, but he has said much that is true and important.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Conning the Taliban

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Ted Rall

Confessions of a Phony American Peace Negotiator

For much of the year now drawing to a close, U.S. and NATO bigwigs conducted secret peace talks with Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, the #2 Taliban official. They paid him tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of dollars to show good will. NATO planes delivered him to the presidential palace in Kabul, where he met with Hamid Karzai.

“But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all,” reports The New York Times. The phony Mansour, Afghan intelligence agents say, was actually “a shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta” who looked nothing like the real guy.

You can’t sugarcoat this debacle. L’affair Mansour instantly transformed the United States, previously reviled as the world’s most brutish bully, into an intergalactic laughingstock.

Yes, our government and military are headed by dumb-as-rocks hillbillies. But the Taliban can be fooled too—as I learned during my own top secret mission deep in the deepest valleys between the highest mountains of the Hindu Kush.

I found myself short of cash while traveling in Afghanistan in August. So I devised an ingenious scheme. Call it Operation Turnabout: Why not present myself to the Taliban as a high-ranking American official eager to end the war? It could be fun. It could be lucrative. And who knows? If they fell for it, I’d be up for the Nobel Peace Prize!

Finding Talibs didn’t take long. I walked up to two guys planting an IED. Or they were stoning some chick. I don’t remember. Anyway, it isn’t important.

“Salaam,” I greeted them. “I am American Vice President Joe Biden. Take me forthwith to your leader, Mullah Omar, he of one eye, and see that you are quick about it.”

The rogues chucked me into the back of their Toyota Landcruiser, wrapped in duct tape. Off we went. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear they hit every pothole on purpose.

Eventually, we stopped. They ripped the tape off my face. “American dog!” they cried in unison. “Time for dinner!” A kebab vendor glared at me from the side of the road. As did the goat head on the grill.

My animal cunning was too much for the two undereducated brutes. “Alas, my good fellows,” I replied, “my White House Amex card is not accepted by yon locals. Might I ‘borrow’ some money? You know—as good faith?”

Soon I was 17 afghanis richer. My plan was working!

A day or two later, my bound form was carried into an empty poured-concrete room in a complex somewhere in The Remote Tribal Areas Along the Border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and dumped on the floor. A bearded man with an eye patch walked in.

“I am Mullah Mohammed Omar, Head of the Supreme Council and Commander of the Faithful of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” he said.

“Hi there,” I said. “I am American Vice President Joe Biden of America.”

He grimaced.

“How do I know you are who you say you are?” he asked.

“Ask me anything,” I challenged. “The combination to the safe where the Oval Office porn collection is kept. Vladimir Putin’s cell number. I can even identify most of the American states.”

He smiled.

“Of course you can,” he said. “But you could say anything. We have no way to check it out. The United States is a distant, remote country. Its leaders have never been seen in public, certainly not by Afghans. We don’t even know if there is a ‘Joe Biden.'”

“We must trust one another,” I purred, “if there is to be peace.”

I had him there. He chuckled. “Yes,” he said.

“Of course, travel between my country and yours is very expensive,” I pointed out. “As you may have heard, we Americans have spent all our money on bonuses for bank CEOs and hedge fund managers. So, if our quest for peace is to have a future, you must front me some cash.”

Sated with watery tea and partly-cooked goat parts, I headed for the Peshawar bus terminal. Where I reserved two full seats in coach. So I could ride, legs spread. American style.

Before long the media reported that the Taliban was conducting secret peace negotiations with “a high-ranking U.S. official.” Naturally, the Americans denied the leaks. President Obama spat: “The cunning enemy is trying to expand its military operations on the basis of its double-standard policy and wants to throw dust into the eyes of the people by spreading the rumors of negotiation.”

No one believed him. No one ever believes Americans.

Ha!

My brilliant ruse continued throughout the month. Sometimes the two cartoonists with whom I was traveling asked me where I was spending nights. “With Mullah Omar!” I wanted to shout. “Eating his nan and blowing through dozens of his afghanis!” But I couldn’t. “I was in the bathroom,” I lied.

Yes, we are a dumber-than-dumb people led by a stupider-than-stupid government. But the Taliban aren’t much smarter.

So there.

(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

Grab ‘n’ Feel

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Susan Stark

The big topic the week seems to be airport security. Millions of white, middle- and upper-middle-class people are now experiencing what until now was experienced by mainly young men of color–arbitrary pat downs and searches.

This is mostly academic to people such as myself. I haven’t had the money to fly since 2006.

But it should be obvious to people what would be most effective in this situation: Boycott the airlines until the nonsense stops. People’s voices and votes may not be worth much these days, but the “dollar votes” are still heard loud and clear by those in power. Vote with your dollars.

But of course, I know you won’t listen. You never do. You’re gonna keep flying, and you’re gonna stand in line at 4am this Friday morning to buy crap shipped in from China.

Get a clue. Please.

Susan out.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Rape My Brain But Don’t Touch My Junk

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Ted Rall

Why TSA Molesters Are Striking a Nerve

“Don’t touch my junk!” Will this be the battle cry of the next American Revolution?

If you think about it, it’s amazing. Why this? But thinking doesn’t have anything to do with it.

There’s a good reason. Which we’ll get to.

“This,” of course, is the intrusive new security-screening regimen at 68 major U.S. airports. You can walk through one of the new “backscatter” body-image X-ray scanners, suck up 2.4 microrems of radiation, and live with the knowledge that a high-res version of your nude flabby body is being stored on some government database so that the Palin Administration will be able to kill you for food and use your cyborg doppelganger as a slave laborer in the living hell that will be the year 2015.

Or you can choose the pat-down. But think twice. By all accounts, the pat-down procedure is thorough. Extremely thorough.

“I didn’t really expect her to touch my vagina through my pants,” schoolteacher Kaya McLaren, an elementary schoolteacher from Washington state told The New York Times about her experience at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. What prompted this feel-up? “The body scanner detected a tissue and a hair band in her pocket,” reported The Times.

Verily, the end times draw nigh. The New York Times is talking dirty.

A visit to the TSA’s official blog (blog.tsa.gov) furthers the impression that the Obama Administration has jumped the security shark. One citizen asks: “Is touching the genitals a mandatory or discretionary part of the pat-down? Will the screener give notice and ask for consent prior to touching the breasts, vagina, penis or scrotum?” Another asks: “Can they spread the buttocks to feel if something is concealed between them? Can they move the penis or testicles aside to see if something is strapped to a man’s leg? Can they lift up breasts to feel underneath them?”

There’s something terribly wrong when a federal government website gets too racy for online parental control software.

CNN’s Rosemary Fitzpatrick reported that an airport screener “ran her hands around her breasts, over her stomach, buttocks and her inner thighs, and briefly touched her crotch.” In Charlotte a flight attendant was ordered to remove and display her prosthetic breast.

It’s happening to guys too. Men wearing baggy pants report TSA personnel, some of whom are convicted rapists and child molesters, sticking their hands down their trousers and ferreting out their naughty bits. In a bit of surrealism recalling my “Al Kidda” cartoon (in which terrorists take advantage of the fact that children aren’t required to show ID to board a plane) there are now YouTube videos showing little kids getting felt up by the TSA.

TSA workers at Miami Airport got caught passing around printed scans of a man they deemed to fall short in the male endowment department. A 61-year-old cancer survivor from Michigan wound up “humiliated, crying and covered with his own urine after an enhanced pat-down by TSA officers” at the Detroit Airport. The oafs broke the seal on his urostomy bag.

There was, naturally, no apology.

Remember the good old days of the early 2000s, when the only thing the TSA did was announce their favorite color of the day?

Of all the indignities inflicted upon the flying public since 9/11, the radiation/molestation combo strikes me as relatively minor. I’m still scarred by the sight of the young Iraq War vet in front of me at Kansas City airport security. Both of his legs had been lost in an IED blast in the Middle East. Instead of respect or a free pass at the metal detector, TSA goons repeatedly grilled and humiliated him about the titanium in his body.

Contrast this with Iran. Yes, Iran. As at security checkpoints throughout the country, I was waved past the checkpoint at Tehran’s Ayatollah Kholmeni International Airport in August as soon as I presented my U.S. passport. As guests, foreigners are not subject to most bag searches. Not even citizens of the Great Satan.

Don’t touch our special parts, but feel free to poke around our frontal lobes.

If Richard Nixon had been accused of listening to every American’s phone calls and reading their mail, there would have been riots. But that’s exactly what the National Security Agency has been doing since 9/11. Bush started it; Obama made it official. They’re reading your email and listening to your phone calls and tracking your bank statements. It’s a fact. And no one cares.

Personally, I’d rather have the government touch my junk than rape my brain.

Now that they’re feeling up our privates at the airport—with, truth be told, considerably more justification than the NSA has for reading your Facebook status updates—the American people are freaking out.

Which should come as little surprise to Obama’s pet louts at the TSA.

The United States, after all, was founded by Puritans. The folks we’re celebrating this week were religious fanatics, prudes, crazy repressed and so far off the charts that they were too uptight to get along with the British. Immigration has helped loosen us up, but that’s still our national culture.

I had hoped that when the revolution came, it would be about economic injustice or torture or racism. But, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you don’t revolt with the revolutionaries you wish you had. If this is the beginning of the end, so be it.

Say it all together: Don’t touch my junk!

(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

Getting Rid of the Deficit

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Susan Stark

Susan here.

Everybody has their own ideas of getting rid of the deficit. I largely agree with my fellow Leftists that defense needs cutting and the tax cuts for the rich have to expire. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

But how about, instead of messing with Social Security and Medicare, which I’m dead set against, we institute tariffs. Americans consume most of the junk that is made in foreign countries. This would also be an indirect tax on corporations. Most likely these tariffs might be passed on to the American consumer, but, what the fuck, we like to spend, don’t we?

Another thing we can do is to institute a carbon tax. Meaning a tax on all retail sales of gas, oil, and coal. We consume all of this like flies eating shit, so this would contribute to deficit reduction.

Oh, and here’s an unconventional solution: Why don’t we decriminalize prostitution? If a woman or man is 18 years of age or older, they should be able to sell their sexuality. If it’s decriminalized, then it can be taxed like any other business is taxed. Legalized forms of sex work such as stripping and porn are already taxed; how much more revenue would be collected if straight up hooking was also taxed? Part of this money could go towards the deficit to pay it off, and would also save tax-payers in wasted billions of dollars because of “vice-arrests” of prostitutes that now occur due to criminalization. (There are people who bring up the “trafficking of minors” argument against decriminalization, but I would add that if we leave consenting adults alone, we have more money and manpower to rescue actual trafficked victims than we do now. So that argument is dead in the water.)

There are so many ways to get rid of the deficit. Starting, of course, with the military.

Empire is Dead.

Susan out.

Boycott the Body Scan

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Ted Rall

If you’re flying Thanksgiving week, support the national boycott on the radiation-based body scan machines at TSA checkpoints. Insist on a pat-down. It’s humiliating and intrusive, but at least there won’t be a nude image of you on sale somewhere next year. Also, it slows down the system–which could force the government to reconsider this awful decision.

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