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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Will Obama Wuss Out on Gitmo?

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Ted Rall
Prez-Elect May Ratify Bush’s Torture Trials The accused terrorist appeared before the military tribunal, charged with conspiracy in a plot against national security. Because state secrets were involved and because harsh interrogation techniques were used to extract information, the defendant was deprived of a look at the evidence. Also denied were the defendant’s traditional right to a lawyer, to face accusers, even to see the judges–they wore hoods. No, this wasn’t at Gitmo. This “court” met in the military dictatorship of Peru. And the defendant wasn’t an Afghan or Arab turned over to U.S. troops by a warlord out for the $10,000 bounty. She was Lori Berenson, a 31-year-old American citizen accused of aiding the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, members of whom she befriended. The Washington Post and New York Times condemned Berenson’s 1996 trial, calling the tribunal and the brutal circumstances of her detention a mockery of justice. In the U.S., most American liberals agreed. Now President-Elect Barack Obama–a…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: No We Didn’t

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Ted Rall
Obama Win More Hysterical Than Historical There is less here than meets the eye. Yes, the election results are notable. But they don’t mean as much as people think. First, the important stuff: The first black president has been elected. And not just elected by a majority of voters, many of whom were black and/or first-time voters, but by nearly half of white voters. Twenty-eight years after the Reagan Revolution, the electorate has repudiated Republican inaction—on Iraq, in New Orleans, most of all on the economy—to an extent not seen since Watergate. Americans delivered a proxy impeachment of George W. Bush, holding McCain less to account for his policies than his association with a (cough) leader they blamed for their troubles. It isn’t quite fair. George W. Bush, lest we forget, had a 90 percent approval rating during the fall of 2001. Now that Bush’s support is down to a Carrot Top-like 22 percent, it’s only fair to remember that…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Don’t Think About Reelection

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Ted Rall
Why Obama Should Consider Himself a One-Term President Barring some unforeseen cataclysmic event, Barack Obama will be elected president Tuesday. Please allow me to be the first to congratulate you, President-Elect Obama, on an historic victory following an extraordinarily disciplined campaign. Are you sure you’re really a Democrat? Enough BSing. As a student of history and the American presidency and a guy who plans to vote for you despite serious doubts, here’s the best advice I can give you: Starting on Inauguration Day, consider yourself a one-term president. This isn’t exactly an original idea. When John McCain launched his own run for the Republican nomination, he originally planned to center his entire campaign around a promise not to seek a second term. “Less than a day before he was set to speak in New Hampshire on April 25,” The Atlantic magazine reported, “McCain ordered his aides to excise…the pledge.” But McCain was on to something. Voters want a president who…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: President Obama—Shut Down This Camp!

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Ted Rall
Next President Should Shut Gitmo on January 20 * Camp has become its own raison d’être* Hundreds locked in legal limbo* Jerking around detainees and their families* Gesture would resonate around the globe François Mitterand brought civilization to France. One of his first acts as president was to end the death penalty. A guy named Philippe Maurice had his date with the guillotine cancelled. Amazing but true: the country that gave the world “The Rights of Man” was still lopping off heads in 1981. Fortunately, things change. Other countries followed France’s lead. Today, just a quarter century later, fewer than a quarter of the world’s nations still carry out capital punishment. Nations that do can’t get into the European Union. Our next president–probably Barack Obama–has a similar opportunity to create a transformative moment toward a fully civilized United States. I’m not talking about abolishing executions, though that is long overdue. President Obama (or McCain) should close Guantánamo. Not after appointing…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Stop the Bleeding

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Ted Rall
A Plan to Bail Out Scared Homeowners Evictions must stop Feds should bail out troubled homeowners Government would take equity stake in home mortgages Cost less than Iraq War Unemployed and desperately worried about losing his home in a California gated community, Karthik Rajaram shot his wife, kids and mother-in-law before turning his new handgun upon himself. “We believe this individual had become despondent recently over his financial dealings and the financial situation of his household,” Los Angeles police said. One of his sons, age 19, was a Fulbright scholar. The previous week, a 90-year-old Ohio woman tried to commit suicide when cops tried to evict her from her foreclosed house. Fortunately, the gunshot wound wasn’t fatal. The financial crisis has claimed a number of lives, but few as poetically as that of Ian Beach of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Like a character in a Kate Chopin novella, the 47-year-old father of two “apparently took painkillers, drank a bottle of whisky…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: If This Is The End of the U.S….

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Ted Rall
…Will Anyone Come To Our Funeral? Before I left for Afghanistan, the producer for my talk radio show asked me to return with a souvenir. “Bring me back an MRE [“Meal Ready to Eat”],” he requested. It was the fall of 2001, a few months into the U.S. invasion, and news accounts said Afghan skies were dark with millions of MREs dropped by U.S. warplanes to the starving masses. I never saw an MRE. Neither did any of the Afghans I talked to. As far as we could tell, the only stuff that American planes dropped on Afghanistan were bombs. Scattered in the rubble one could find the shards of said explosives, the well-known names of the defense contractors visible in black-stenciled English. Bombs: America’s biggest export. Food: not so much. I’m torn over what The Washington Post has so cavalierly dubbed “the economic apocalypse.” When I was 21, I prayed for this. The United States of America was the…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Mad Money

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Ted Rall
A Broke America Can’t Afford Wars, Tax Cuts Credit has dried up. The stock market is disintegrating. Unless someone pours money into capital markets, everyone agrees, we could wind up like people in Baghdad, fondly remembering the day five years ago when they pushed the handle and their toilets still flushed. Only one “someone” has enough cash to fix the problem: the U.S. government. The Bush Administration and Congressional Democrats want taxpayers to pay $700 billion to bail out failing banks. Progressives would prefer to bail out homeowners facing the imminent foreclosure of their homes, as well as those in danger of being foreclosed upon during 2009, at a cost of $1.3 trillion. Never mind which approach is better. Where will the government find the money? There are two elephants in the room: war and Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. We can’t afford either. Yet, to abuse the animal metaphor, everyone acts like they’re sacred cows. When you think…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Bush, Congress Party Like It’s 1929

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Ted Rall
Save People, Not Bankers Seat belt laws embolden drivers to drive faster, causing a net loss of life. It’s the law of unintended consequences, also known as the Peltzman effect: the safer you feel, the more risk you take. Sam Peltzman, the economist after whom said effect is named, says that government bailouts like the Bush Administration’s $700 billion attempt to stave off economic collapse are no more effective than “pouring money down a rat hole.” Moral hazard–rewarding reckless people and companies while allowing responsible ones to fail (hello, Lehman Brothers) may avert one economic crisis while planting the seeds of a worse one down the road. “In the long run,” says Peltzman, “you’re just laying the groundwork for more because you’re giving people an incentive to take too much risk, where a big part of the risk gets laid off on the taxpayer.” I don’t think much of the laissez faire, magic-of-the-marketplace, let-’em-eat-flat-screens school of Darwinian economics flogged by…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Good, the Bad and the Editor

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Ted Rall
Why Political Cartoons Matter More Than Ever I could not help but notice the editorial cartoon,” complains a Canadian newspaper reader, “which in my opinion was not funny or satirical at all–in the past, the purpose of an editorial cartoon.” An editor at the Houston Chronicle disagrees. “The point of satire is not to be funny,” he argues. “The point is to be critical.” Who’s right? Both. Neither. Who knows? And that’s the problem. For some reason my colleagues have made me President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC), the organization for professional political cartoonists. (I suspect cartoonists’ predilection for hard drinking had something to do with it.) Kidding aside, I’m honored. And scared. As I’ve written before, daily newspapers–the biggest source of income for cartoonists–are in crisis. Bottom lines dependent on ad revenue, decimated by the migration of advertising money to the impecunious Web, are now getting killed by the recession. Layoffs and buyouts of reporters and…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Bristol Did The Wrong Thing

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Ted Rall
Abortion Should Be Mandatory for Pregnant Teens You don’t need a rich imagination to picture the scene. In the Alaska governor’s mansion, a pair of parents and their visibly pregnant teenage daughter sit on a dead bear sprawled across a couch they had to have shipped because there isn’t an Ethan Allen in Anchorage. On a second sofa, on the opposite side of a glass coffee table festooned by the exoskeleton of a giant crab, fidget a second set of parents and their son, a.k.a. The Extremely Nervous Boyfriend. Heads of dead animals line the walls. “Levi, Levi, Levi.” The governor pauses, reveling in the others’ discomfort. Moments like this are how she earned the sobriquet Barracuda. She leans in. “You little s—. You knocked up my daughter. Do you know how close your little sexcapade came to screwing up my plan for global domination? Now you’re going to do the right thing.” A few days later, Extremely Nervous Boyfriend…
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