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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Presidential Politics: All Personality, No Platform

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Ted Rall
Distributed by Creators Syndicate (click the link to purchase for publication): Hillary Clinton has everything she needs to run for president: money, name recognition, staff, organization. Everything except ideas. The 2016 presidential campaign will begin in earnest in late summer. This hasn’t snuck up on her; she has known this was coming since at least 2008. Yet here she is, six months before the unofficial start of her run, starting to figure out what she’ll do if she wins. “People close to Mrs. Clinton say she has not yet settled on a specific platform” on the economy, the New York Times notes in a report about a recent series of meetings she held with 200 economists in order to collect their assessments of the economy. There’s nothing wrong with asking experts for suggestions about how to fix the problems you want to solve. But you should already have a vision for what America and its economy ought to look like.…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Why Are We At War with ISIS?

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Ted Rall
Is there any justification at all for bombing ISIS? There isn’t any Congressional authorization, much less a declaration of war. Is there even a good reason for the U.S. to be involved? There is no better time to ask this question than now, as much of the world (me included) is disgusted by the Islamic State’s beheadings of two kidnapped Japanese nationals, the second one an acclaimed journalist and humanist who lost his life trying to rescue the first. It is easy to forget, too easy, that for Americans going to war was until recently an act undertaken only after every other alternative had been thoroughly explored and completely exhausted, that the bar for casus belli was high, and that war wasn’t the standard response to outrage or international crisis, but quite unusual, a deviation from the normal order of business. Hard to imagine now, but the United States did not declare war against Germany after its U-boat torpedoed and…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Still Trust Them? Now the Government Is Tracking You So It Can Steal Your Car

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Ted Rall
According to federal government documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, federal and local law enforcement agencies are using incredibly sneaky technology to track you as you drive the nation’s streets and highways. Their goal? Stealing your car. This latest scandal — a mash-up of privacy violations on a wide NSA-like scale, corrupt asset forfeiture programs that make a mockery of the U.S. as a nation that respects private property rights, and brazen targeting of lawful gun owners — is a perfect political storm, an outrage that ought to bring liberals, libertarians and conservatives together in an alliance of freedom-loving people against an out-of-control government. Given the collective shrug elicited by the Edward Snowden revelations, however, expecting a big reaction may be unrealistic. In the shell of a nut: the ACLU has learned that the DEA and local police departments are scanning every motorist’s license plate as they drive down American streets. The NYPD and LAPD have each already…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: “Selma” and Hollywood’s Sleazy Perversion of History

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Ted Rall
Movies are the historical record. Americans experience the Vietnam War by watching “Apocalypse Now,” slavery in “12 Years a Slave,” and D-Day through “Saving Private Ryan.” A lot more Americans watch historical movies than read history books. Which, when done well, is not a bad thing. I’ve read countless books about the collapse of Nazi Germany, but the brilliantly-acted and directed reenactment of Hitler’s last days in his Berlin bunker depicted in the masterful 2004 German film “Downfall” can’t be beat. When a film purports to depict a historical event, it becomes the only version of what most people believe really happened. So, as we move further into a post-literate society, misleading historical filmmaking isn’t just a waste of 2-1/2 hours. It’s a crime against the truth. The Ava DuVernay-directed film “Selma” is at the center of controversy, both due to its semi-snubbing by the Oscars – viewed as backtracking from last year’s relatively racially diverse choice of nominees –…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Want to Support Free Expression After Charlie Hebdo? Hire a Political Cartoonist.

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Ted Rall
Here’s what you need to understand the state of political cartooning in the United States: After the massacre of four cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo last week, 25 remain on staff at the French publication, whose circulation ranges between 30,000 and 60,000 per week. In the United States, a total of 25 staff political cartoonists are employed by the nation’s 1,350 newspapers, which have a combined circulation of 44,000,000 daily in print, plus 113,000,000 unique online visitors. The total number of political cartoonists employed on staff by all American websites is one. The total number at all magazines is zero. It wasn’t always like this. According to a report issued by the Herblock Foundation, there were 2,000 political cartoonists on staff at newspapers a century ago. Sure, print media has had to cut back due to a half-century of declining circulation. Writers, photographers and others have all suffered. But cartoonists have been eliminated at the highest rate of any journalism category…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Editors, Not Terrorists, Killed American Political Cartooning

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Ted Rall
Terrorism doesn’t scare political cartoonists nearly as much as editors — and the corporate bean-counters who tell them what to do. The Charlie Hebdo massacre couldn’t have happened here in the United States. But it’s not because American newspapers have better security. Gunmen could never kill four political cartoonists in an American newspaper office because no paper in the U.S. employs two, much less four, staff political cartoonists — the number who died Wednesday in Paris. There is no equivalent of Charlie Hebdo, which puts political cartoons front and center, in the States. (The Onion never published political cartoons — and it ceased print publication last year. MAD, for which I draw, focuses on popular culture.) When I began drawing political cartoons professionally in the early 1990s, hundreds of my colleagues worked on staff at newspapers, with full salaries and benefits. That was already down from journalism’s mid-century glory days, when there were thousands. Many papers employed two. Shortly after…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: If Obama Won’t Bring Torturers to Justice, Why Give Cash to Torture Victims?

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Ted Rall
President Obama has made it clear since taking office that no one will be punished for torture. As I have repeatedly written before, that’s reprehensible. But what about compensating torture victims? According to the recent report issued by the Senate intelligence committee, torture under the Bush Administration was more brutal and widespread than previously understood. According to CIA torturers themselves, many of the victims were as innocent as innocence gets. Mistranslations of Arabic names, for example, led to the torture of people wrongly identified as anti-American militants. Former State Department official under Bush Lawrence Wilkerson, admitted that Gitmo was never filled with evil America-haters: “It became apparent to me as early as August 2002, and probably earlier to other State Department personnel who were focused on these issues, that many of the prisoners detained at Guantánamo had been taken into custody without regard to whether they were truly enemy combatants, or in fact whether many of them were enemies at…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Still No National Healthcare For Mental Illness? That’s Crazy

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Ted Rall
TED RALL STILL NO NATIONAL HEALTHCARE FOR MENTAL ILLNESS? THAT’S CRAZY BY TED RALL RELEASE: WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 24, 2014 The sister of the 28-year-old man who shot his ex-girlfriend in Baltimore the same morning he killed two New York police officers as they sat in their patrol car in Brooklyn said her brother had long suffered from mental illness, but hadn’t received treatment. “He was an emotionally troubled young man, and he was suicidal,” said Jalaa’i Brinsley. “Clearly something’s wrong. He should have been offered help in the system, right? But he wasn’t.” Indeed. Something is very wrong. In the United States, psychiatric care is a luxury that, at $150 an hour and up for counseling that can last for months or even years, only the very wealthiest citizens can afford. This latest sorry episode serves as yet another reminder that ours remains a country in its infancy when it comes to health care, despite the undeniable turning point marked…
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