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As we hear the comparisons of the current economic crisis to the beginnings of the Great Depression, an accompanying warning is that all the economic actions of the New Deal were ineffective, and it was the entry of the US into World War II in 1941 that ended the Depression. For example here is George Will in today's (Nov 15) New York Times: "…The Depression, which FDR failed to end but which Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor did end…" There is a scary message for us today in that idea, but it ain't so. Here is some data:

In 1930, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States was $91.2 billion dollars. By 1933, when FDR became President, GDP had fallen to its lowest annual value of $56.4 billion. Under FDR, the United States GDP rose steadily through 1940, the year before the US entered the war, to $101.4 billion. In fact, GDP had recovered to the level of 1930 by 1937; it did decline from that level in 1938 but by 1939 was back again to the 1930 level. It is true that the level of GDP did not EXCEED the 1929 level until 1941, but let's also remember that Pearl Harbor and America's entry into the war did not come about until the end of that year. (http://www.bea.gov/scb/pdf/2008/08%20August/0808_gdp_nipas.pdf)

So it is not necessary to have a war in order to get out of a depression. Armageddon is not a policy tool for economic recovery.

The attacks by the McCain campaign, accusing Obama of being a Socialist, sound like a reversion back to something from the 1950s. That is the way the media portrays it, as an amusing and ridiculous jab being made by a desperate campaign that is on the ropes with nothing better to offer. Even Obama's dismissive response about sharing his toys as a child seems to regard it that way.

But the attack is much more insidious and subtle than that. The fact that it is being rolled out in the last week of the campaign suggests to me that the Republicans think that this is the most powerful shot left in their arsenal, and could be the game-changer they rely on to win the election at the last minute.

As McPalin describe it, the socialist accusation is a claim that Obama will take "your" hard earned money and give it to "them." Given the demographics of the group that is being targeted with this pitch - blue collar and middle class whites - it is not hard to see who "they" are.

Just as George H.W Bush's Willie Horton ads were not about crime, and Ronald Reagan's railing on about welfare Cadillacs was not about welfare reform, this socialist line is not about economics or even ideology. Nor is it about painting Obama as outside the main stream.

It is all about stoking the residual and ill- concealed racism that remains a powerful factor in America. It is designed to evoke stereotypes of lazy, shiftless, unemployed blacks in the south and Midwest, drunk Indians in the southwest, and illegal immigrants in big sombreros sleeping in the sun, all supported by the welfare funds taken from "your" hard earned dollars. The campaign is brilliantly indirect, but it is the nastiest attack yet on Obama. It is the McCain campaign playing the race card.

Maybe it is right for us to treat the attack as a throwback to McCarthyism that merely reflects on the age of McCain. Maybe the attack is too subtle and the American people too dumb to respond as the Republicans intend. Maybe America is not as racist as they think. Maybe the fall of communism makes the whole thing irrelevant. But the Republicans would not be rolling it out as their dying gasp of the campaign if they believed that.

In a wonderful article, Peter W. Galbraith reviews the recent history and current status of the war in Iraq. He starts by looking at the definitions of victory used by President Bush - a unified, democratic and stable Iraq. McCain's definition is similar - an Iraq that is a "democratic ally." So the issue on the table is the path that makes democrats out of theocrats, sidelines Iran and "reconcile Kurds and Sunnis in Iraq's new order.

According to Galbraith, the surge has not been the main reason for the decline in violence. Rather, it is the rise of the Sunni "Awakening" that, supported by the Americans, have driven out al-Qaeda from the Sunni areas and diminished the awful attacks on the Shiites. This enabled the Shiite Moqtada al-Sadr to order his Mahdi Army to stand down, thinking that the US presence was temporary, and keep his powder dry for a subsequent renewed civil war with the Sunni.

But once the Shiite party most closely aligned with Iran assumed power in the central government under Maliki, the Shiite national army with American help was used to oust the Mahdi Army from most of Basra and reduced their power in Sadr City, Baghdad's Shiite slum. So in 2007 and 2008, according to Galbraith, Sunnis and Shiites fought civil wars, the Awakening (not the Americans) emerged to defeat al-Qaeda, the ruling Shiites undercut the Mahdi Army. So it was not the Shiite Iraqi army defeating insurgents but the Sunnis.

Maliki wants the US to withdraw so that he can turn his forces against the Sunni and the Kurds because he leads a Shiite party that wants to turn Iraq into a Shiite Islamic state, allied with Iran. Until 2007, the Americans fought alongside the Shiite-led Iraqi army, but under General Petraeus backed the Sunni Awakening that is deeply hostile to the Shiite government. So Maliki want the US to get out. With Americans gone, the Iraqi army and police could attack the Awakening. And Iran would back them up.

Meanwhile the Kurds in the north, who are secular, pro-western and democratic according to Galbraith, have been attacked by the central government forces at Khanaqin. Although the forces withdrew later, it was a danger sign to the Kurds, who have opposed us slaes of F-16s to Iraq because they fear they will be used against them.

Meanwhile, the political reconciliation that was supposed to happen once the surge bought some time has not occurred. For Maliki, the Kurds and Sunni are obstacles to achieving a Shiite Islamic state. Iran, not the US, is his primary ally, and he is a hard lineShiite militant from the Dawa Party, having spent twenty years in Iran and Syria.

John McCain says often that due to the surge, we are winning the Iraq war and that he wants to continue supporting a government and Iraqi factions that are Iran's closest allies in the Middle East. "He praises the Awakening and but [sic] seems not to have realized that the Iraqi government is intent on crushing it." His denunciations of Obama and Biden offer no protection to Iraq's Kurds.

"George W. Bush has put the United States on the side of undemocratic Iraqis who are Iran's allies. John McCain would continue the same approach. It is hard to understand how this can be called a success - or a path to victory."

• Whatever one thinks of lawyers, at least most of them are trained to have respect for the law. My experience with business types like the current gang running the executive branch is that the law is something to be ignored whenever possible, manipulated when necessary, and selectively interpreted when forced. The consequences have been awful- Iran/Contra under Reagan and Bush 1, and wholesale assault on the Constitution, the disrespect for international law, and the contempt for the legal process under Bush 2 and his henchmen, especially Dick Cheney. So the lawyers get my vote.
• Texas has a well-deserved reputation as having a frontier ethos, characterized by god, guns, and football as well as an anti-intellectualism that solves complex issues with simple, easy - to-understand answers that are wrong. Arizona and the O.K. corral is not far behind, but the only place that is more rabid along these lines is Alaska. I've had enough of "common sense" and ideology driving the definitions of problems and their solutions. So no votes for the shoot-from-the- hip types.

After watching her on CBS with Couric, I am no longer concerned that she would be a heart beat away from the presidency if McCain died in office. By any standard, she showed herself to be brain dead, so the presidency would go to the Speaker of the House.

The combination of added national debt in the trillions, the huge increase in money supply to fund the bailouts and the reduction in private lending as government borrowing crowds out the private sector will lead to inflation, high unemployment as private investment is suppressed, and high interest rates as the government borrows more to pay bond holders and bad debt holders that it has bailed out. Oh, and higher taxes probably. Goverment investment in everything will suffer.

The next President will have no flexibility to do anything much. We can maybe save some money by ending the war in Iraq, but that's going to look like a drop in the bucket.

Brace yourself for the "October Surprise." Will it help McCain? Who cares! It will put all our lives at risk. Here's the scenario…

Sometime before January 20, 2009, Israel will probably attack Iran, targeting the nuclear facilities that they fear will give Iran the nuclear capability to attack Israel. Ironically, the more likely that Obama is to be elected President, the more likely is this scenario, as the Israelis will want to do it while they have the continued unquestioning support of Bush and Cheney.

It is Bush and Cheney who have been the primary source of threats to attack Iran, but given their lame duck status, the stretched state of the US military and the adamant opposition of the Pentagon, it is unlikely that the US will do it directly. But evidence is mounting that Israel will.

Thomas Powers argues convincingly in "Iran: The Threat" (NY Review of Books, July 17, 2008, 9-11) that the US lacks the military and economic capacity to take on Iran, being stretched to the max in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the alarmist rhetoric of war continues unabated. John Bolton likens Iran's danger to a new September 11 with nuclear weapons (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11849446/).

But Iran, like Iraq, has never been a threat to the United States - it is a threat to Israel. The link to the United States is the "joined at the hip" policies that result in US foreign policy being formulated in Jerusalem. The reasons for that extend beyond international relations to religious beliefs in the "Last Days" and inception of Armageddon, typified by the preaching of John Hagee, who is supporting John McCain. (http://www.jedreport.com/2008/03/john-mccains-em.html)

Which brings us around to the price of oil. The consensus of the economics profession is that the soaring price of oil is not due to speculators. "buying a futures contract doesn't directly reduce the supply of oil to consumers ." (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/opinion/27krugman.html?_r=1&oref=login)
But futures contracts reflect beliefs about the future trends of supply and demand. And while it is undoubtedly true that growth in China, India and the developing world increase demand and drive up prices, and while it is also true that unrest in Nigeria raises worries about supply disruptions, that does not seem to be enough to cause $4 and $5 dollar jumps in prices in a single day.

Instead it appears that the oil markets are expecting severe supply disruption that could only result from an impending major war in the Middle East. All signs indicate that such a war would be triggered by an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. "Israel has conducted ostentatious long-range air exercises over the Mediterranean, and one former chief of staff has called an attack inevitable if Iran continues its nuclear work." And John Bolton thinks it could happen after the American election but before the inauguration. ("It's Later than You Think" The Economist, June 28th, 2008, 16). Iran appears to expect such an attack and has issued a warning that is guaranteed to drive oil prices up again …According to the Financial Times ("Tehran Issues Warning to Israel, June 30, 2008) Iran would close the Straits of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf and strike Israel with long range missals.

Play that one out in your mind. Israel strikes Iran, Iran strikes back and shuts off oil exports from the Middle East. Hamas and Hezbollah come out shooting on Israel's northern and southern borders and bring in Syria, which in any case has a mutual defense treaty with Iran. The US comes to Israel's defense from bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do the Russians stand by during a major shooting war on their southern border? Seems unlikely. There is a mutual defense treaty that exists through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that addresses mutual defense issues among China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, and which has included summit meetings with Iran (Iran Seeks Membership http://www.wmdinsights.com/I19/I19_EA2_BishkekSummit.htm).

Meanwhile, the US Senate stages a hearing aimed to address the surge in oil prices by blaming speculators and closing obscure loopholes in regulation that allow parallel oil trading in London. The hearings are chaired by the Senator from Israel, Joe Lieberman (I, CN). ("Lieberman Seeks Limits to Reduce Speculation" http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/washington/12trade.html)

It will be a lovely little war.

The outburst of Harriet Christian that demeans Barak Obama's run for the Democratic nomination for President and that has played over and over again on YouTube, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5unWHvq9ysI) spawns some interesting thoughts. One, (and I am far from the first to think of this), it creates a mirror image on Hillary Clinton's side comparable to the Reverend Wright image on Obama's side - the Angry White Woman (" God damn the Democratic Party!") vis-à-vis the Angry Black Man ("God damn the United States!"). Clearly, both are passionate in their feelings, both use intemperate language, and both have become caricatures to be used by opponents of the supporters of the other.

Second, the emotions that she vented were clearly based on a frustration that is rooted in the sense of betrayal of the entitlement on the part of Hillary Clinton; that the nomination was being stolen from the better candidate by Obama "an inadequate black man" in the words of Ms. Christian, who would not even have been running were it not for the desire to stop Hillary. The overt racism is astonishing, especially from someone who described herself as a worker for civil rights. While the frustration is understandable, the view that sexism somehow trumps racism in America is stunning. (A separate debate on that subject is worth having.)

The recoil from these images also has a more subtle psychological message. Both Reverend Wright and Harriet Christian represent what skeptics and critics fear and believe is the face of the two candidates in the privacy of their own hearts. The critics of Barak Obama's links to Reverend Wright, and their condemnation for his slowness in distancing himself from the preacher, reflect a belief that, stripped of his political language and smooth talk, as a black man in America, Obama must hold the same beliefs.
The rant of Harriet Christian has a similar impact: that this must be what Hillary Clinton feels once all the stage management is removed and the raw feelings are allowed to emerge. That suspicion is fed further by the carryings on of her husband, who damaged Hillary's campaign immeasurably with his ranting that, though a bit more subdued, carried the same message of betrayed entitlement.

Nobody likes losing. But I doubt that Obama ever felt any sense of entitlement, any more than John Edwards or Chris Dodd. But Hillary and Bill Clinton feel like they have been rejected by those whom they believed to be their friends. Even the limited public visibility of the Clintons' reaction back when Governor Bill Richardson announced that he would back Obama (which I think was the turning point in the Obama campaign)revealed that sense of betrayal. And the image of Harriet Christian's outburst may well reveal the true feelings of the Clintons to their defeat.

Spitzer has just given American men another "Fatal Attraction" moment. That movie scared the crap out of men all over the country and probably reduced the rate of marital infidelity for a generation. I expect that Spitzer never saw it. Getting caught on a wiretap using hookers is going to turn a lot of congressMEN against FISA, wanting more oversight over the NSA, and high standards for court ordered taps.

I am a consultant in development economics, so I travel internationally a lot. Currently I am in West Africa. This exposure gives me a special perspective on our elections.

To the world, America is not just another country - it is an Idea. That Idea embodies all the words that we throw around in our political discourse - opportunity, justice, democracy, inclusion, tolerance. So this election is about the Idea of America. (Don't get me wrong. I have met no one so naïve as to think the reality always measures up to the ideal. People understand all about bigotry, abuse of power, kleptocracy, corruption and injustice. But these facts on the ground do not overcome the Idea.)

One of the many tragedies of the Bush-Cheney years is that this Idea of America is on the verge of being extinguished in the eyes of the world. America is increasingly seen as guided by self-righteous self-interest. Big, dangerous, disrespectful, selfish, threatening and bullying. Bush and Cheney have turned America into just another country.

So the issue here is not Hillary Clinton's question of which candidate crosses the threshold to be Commander-in-Chief. The issue is which candidate crosses the threshold to shift America from the pursuit of self-righteous self-interest back to the Idea of America. Which candidate most recognizes that our national self-interest is best furthered by embracing the Idea that America represents, that leadership means having a willing following, not one cajoled into obedient ranks by threats and bribery; one that recognizes our mutual global interdependence, not beggar-my-neigbor and go it alone.

The world is following our election very closely. People may not understand our political process very well, with primaries and caucuses and all that. But they understand that democracy is in action. We are in a process that is being watched by cab drivers, waitresses, street vendors and panhandlers from Abuja to Yerevan and from Nassau to Addis Ababa.

If we show the world that Americans can use democracy to restore the Idea of America, all God's children will be dancing in the streets.

Went to the Dem caucus in Evergreen on Tuesday - what a great turnout. In 2004, my heavily Republican neighborhood turned out only 5 Dems - this time, 44!and we split 2 to 1 for Obama.

My question: how did Clinton and Obama do in states that are caucus - based versus those that are primary ballot - based? Strikes me that Clinton won in states that have big Democratic party machines (except Illinois, which is of course Obama's home state.)

Given the overwhelming importance of water allocations in the West, I am astonished that so little has been reported about the recent revisions to the Interstate Colorado River Water Compact that were just approved. In the little I read ( and the least coverage, short of none at all, was in the Denver Post - shame on them) it appears that the lower basin states are going to get more water in times of shortage (wouldn't that be now?. But it was not clear at whose expense. One article hinted that it would come out of water that goes to Mexico. I have to admit that I am suspicious - who gains and who loses from this? What does it mean for Colorado? How will it affect housing development and construction? Agriculture? Fishing and wildlife? The Front Range versus the Western Slope? Will the price of water become more related to its opportunity cost? Is this a grab by lower basin states that will hurt Colorado? Is this another "Chinatown"? I have seen nothing on these issues in the press. Anybody know?

Since the Republicans largely boycotted a scheduled event at Morehouse College, there has been some discussion floating around about how the "Party of Lincoln" has "turned its back" on black voters. Schwarzenegger gave a speech to that effect to Republicans in California a week or so ago.

I am here to tell you - it ain't so. The Republicans have leaned heavily on blacks and other minorities because they have based their agenda on the votes of the white backlash ever since the days of the civil rights movement to create the party that they are today. It was the evil genius of George Wallace that took the southern racist reaction to civil rights campaigns and draped it in the white sheets of states' rights, "drown-it-in-the-bathtub" small government, anti-gun control, white evangelical christianism, using racism as the subtext. Wallace's approach was adopted by Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican convention. Black delegates were systematically harassed and expelled. Jackie Robinson, a lifelong Republican, said that at that convention, he could understand what it must have been like in Nazi Germany.

You can connect the underlying racist dots from there to Nixon's southern strategy in 1968, Reagan "democrats", the war on drugs (crack gets more punishment than coke), welfare reform ("welfare Cadillac"), and the Willie Horton ad, and the transformation of the word "liberal" into an epithet (Wallace did that.) With changes in generations and demographics, the approach is now being extended to cover the new "others of color" - (Arab) Muslims and (Latino) immigrants.

Republicans have put racists into high judicial position to reinforce these views, including Chief Justice Rehnquist, who was a Goldwater protégé and supporter of his 1964 campaign, and wrote numerous opinions arguing against racial justice, school integration, voting rights, and later worked for Attorney General John Mitchell of Watergate fame.

Chief Justice Roberts was Rehnquist's law clerk. While less overtly racist than his predecessor, Roberts has continued to interpret laws that buttress the white sheet that covers so many Republican policies, generally limiting the reach of Federal power, except when that reach undermines civil liberties that can protect the rights of individuals. It is easy to forget that before the Civil Rights Act and Voting Act, state law was flagrantly used to attack and suppress the civil rights movement. In today's environment, Martin Luther King would probably be in Guantanamo instead of Parchman, and the Constitutional rights that eventually led to Federal intervention to integrate the nation would have been waved aside under charges of terrorism and insurrection. Bull Connor and the southern sheriffs would have supported KKK policies even more freely in Selma, Birmingham, and Oxford, protected by a Supreme Court and Justice Department that defends state's rights against human rights.

So let's not pretend that the Republicans are the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt; those days have been gone since 1964. But they do embrace the objects of their enmity, because they need them to scare the white folks. Without black and brown folks, most of their agenda is empty.

I've been involved lately in a debate about global warming that has forced me to think through the issue. I was taken aback by the views of an educated neighbor who denies that it is happening - I was as shocked as though I was hearing holocaust denial. He provided me some reading material, so I had to react. Here are my thoughts, and I would love to hear yours.

Most of these thoughts would have applied before I read the material, by the way. I'm not a climate scientist or even an earth scientist, so you can read my thoughts as coming from a reasonably informed layman, and certainly not a specialist.
• I totally agree that climate models are highly unreliable and primitive. I understand the GIGO principle, and I have a lot of faith in the ability of combinations of technical innovations and economic incentives to alter predicted outcomes, as evidenced all the way from Malthus to the Club of Rome.
• The evidence against climate change is equally weak however, and the advocates like Richard Lindzen (MIT) of that position strike me as more than somewhat panglossian. I see two general approaches from the denyers: One is to measure actual climate change, and finding no relationship or an inverse relationship based on a simple regression between average temperature and time, conclude that there is nothing to global warming. This "modeling" approach is even weaker than the climate models that are being criticized. I put them in the same category as arguments that there is no scientific proof that smoking is linked to cancer. The second approach is to conclude that since global average temperatures are within historical extremes, that any warming trend that may exist is normal and we should just get over it.

My big problem with all this is that I do not believe that diagnostics that simply rely on looking at average temperatures is revealing. The earth's climate is the result of highly complex interactions of multiple forces ranging from sunlight reflected from ice on the poles, to the actions of ocean currents, forest coverage, passing events like volcanic ash, and yes, human action including the atmospheric impacts of industrialization. The climate models have probably not captured the first order effects of all these factors, much less the second or third order ones. But I have studied system dynamics enough to understand that any dynamic inter-related system that is subject to hysteresis and variable time lags is vulnerable to wild gyrations when the system is disturbed, although those gyrations may come slowly and build from apparently small causes.

As an economist, I generally look for changes in systems at their margins, not at their average, just as a pool of water dries up from the surface and retreats from its banks, not from its depths. I also am a fan of catastrophe theory (see Rene Thom), which suggests that systems can exhibit smooth predictable change until a threshold is passed, and then exhibit a sudden and non-linear change of structure. I also am enough of a statistician to understand the difference between Type I and Type II errors and enough of an economist to attribute costs to each, especially when the costs of reversing an error are very high.

So put all that together, and I see evidence at the margins that something is happening to the climate - at the margins, some cities and coastlines are being drowned, storms of surprising strength seem to be showing an increase, ice is certainly melting at the poles and glaciers are shrinking, polar bears are drowning and weather patterns are appearing outside the norms. Add to that Chinese pollution, the loss of Amazon rain forests, and disturbances in the cycle of rainy and dry seasons in Africa, and the causes for concern start to rise.

Is all that evidence of global warming? Not conclusively, but then I start thinking about Type I and Type II error - if there is no global warming but we act to prevent it, there may be some detriment to economic growth, although I suspect that the net effect of that impact would actually be positive as carbon trading will probably create innovation, jobs and growth in response to the price incentives that are the justification for such trading systems. (And just because Enron wanted to make a business of emissions trading doesn't make it a bad thing. Their problems were not due to that. There is an active market in emissions trading in Los Angeles and also in the EU.) But if there is global warming and we do nothing, the result will be quite unpredictable, although those impacts will fall more on our children and grand children. I certainly do not want my descendants cursing their forebears for doing nothing when they still had the chance.

And to argue that global warming is unambiguously beneficial because it will increase farming yields strikes me as the worst sort of chicanery. To look at simple averages does not reveal the full potential for local dislocations that are impossible to model, but are likely to be very significant - storms, flooding, droughts, forest fires, desertification, population movements and associated wars for resources - these things have happened in the past, and they were often a result of local climate changes. It is the apparently anomalous local changes at the margin that eventually reveal themselves in changes of averages. It took decades for the computer revolution to start showing up in US productivity numbers. But that doesn't mean that the computer revolution wasn't happening.

So now we have massive infrastructure failure at both ends of the Mississippi River. I guess this is the moment when the conservative goal of dragging off the government and drowning it has been most successful. The trouble is that both this tragedy and Hurricane Katrina demonstrate that government is not "them"- it is "us." And we are the ones being literally drowned. And before we are all overwhelmed by red herring press discussions of gussets versus welded construction on bridges, let's remember this -road and bridge maintenance is about funding, and we all know where the funds are going.

Bush stood up in a news conference and spoke relaxedly about the sub-prime mortgage disaster rippling through world markets. He said that the market would correct naturally and that we should all be happy that the economy is in such good shape, and that tax-and-spend Democrats would raise our taxes, undermine the entrepreneurial spirit and alter the spending habits of Americans who know better how to spend their money than does the government.

But infrastructure is not created by entrepreneurs and private investors. Infrastructure is more than simply a large capital investment like a telephone company or an electrical generator. Infrastructure generates social benefits that are beyond the financial returns to an investor. And infrastructure has what economists call "positive network effects." In other words, the more of it there is, the more valuable it becomes. An entrepreneur can build a toll road between two or three points, but unless it connects to all the other roads, it is of minimal value ("Bridge to Nowhere"). No entrepreneur would build the interstate highway system. And none would maintain it.

Government is the institution that societies create to handle things that we must do in common, and that will not be done well or at all by individuals acting in their own self-interest, no matter how enlightened. And there are a lot of those.

So it turns out that two studies of the transcripts from hearings on the Guantanamo detainees reached different and pretty much opposite conclusions.
One done by Seton Hall University School of Law says that they are mostly harmless. It concluded that only eight percent of detainees had been described by the US military as Al-Qaeda fighters and that 55 percent had not committed any hostile acts against the United States.

The other says they're bad guys. A center at the US Military Academy at West Point, concludes that 73 percent of inmates represented a "demonstrated threat" to US and allied forces, and 95 percent were at minimum a "potential threat." (What about the other 5 percent?)

According to the NY Times, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Felter, director of the Combating Terrorism Center, told the Times it was an independent evaluation and carried out without Pentagon supervision. (Yeah. Right!)

But you know what, folks, THAT'S NOT THE POINT. They may be very bad folks at Gitmo. But if so, give them a fair trial, where they get due process, and if they are bad guys, lock'em up and throw away the key.

My opposition to Gitmo is not whether the detainees are a threat or not. I am prepared to concede that some are. The problem is that they need a chance to defend themselves in case they are there wrongfully and are being held unjustly and unlawfully.

It is tyranny to arrest and incarcerate people and give them no opportunity to defend themselves against the charges. US citizens have fought and died for this principle in war after war since the Revolution,and American policy historically has been built around opposition to tyrants around the world on that basis (unless, recently, they have oil or are anti-communist).

I see on Japan's news channel that China has just extended health coverage to an additional 300 million people, paid by the state.

I woke up at 4:00 AM to watch the YouTube debate (I am currently in a time zone 11 hours later than Colorado. ) I was struck by what the questions said about America. Maybe the lineup reflects more on CNN's screening process than the full range of questions that were submitted. Will the unscreened questions get posted on YouTube?

After it was over, I for the first time went systematically through my feelings about each candidate. For whatever it's worth, here goes:

Hillary Clinton: Clearly competent and politically savvy, but politics as usual if she gets elected. I got no real sense of a vision for the direction of the country; more a laundry list of policy papers.

Barack Obama: pretty much the opposite of Hillary Clinton; "you got policy papers; we got policy papers." But I think that he has a vision for a better America that is not evident from Hillary. Sadly, I still think that America is still too racist and sexist to elect a black man or a white woman.

John Edwards: One trick pony: poverty. It's a great trick and a great pony, but it's not enough.

Joe Biden and Chris Dodd: stay in the Senate, guys. You're doing a good job there.

Bill Richardson: I started out favoring him - I feel that Dems need to stop nominating candidates from the Northeast Kennedy machine. Richardson has a great resume and is a westerner as well as having the Hispanic thing going for him. He has executive experience as a governor and is clearly a gifted diplomat. But he just doesn't seem presidential to me; I would love to see him as Secretary of State.

Dennis Kucinich: one trick pony: end the war. Like Edwards, it's a great pony and a great trick. I'm glad he's there to hold others' feet to the fire, but he ain't gonna be the next President.

Mike Gravel: kudos for his stance in Vietnam (I am a vet of that era), but I don't want that anger running the country.

What about stupid drug laws, fighting terrorism by inconveniencing terrorists (that stupid no-fly list, nail clipper confiscation, taking off shoes), the death penalty, media concentration and other antitrust enforcement, clean water and air (global warming is important, but not the only environmental issue), lobbying reform, union organizing, prescription drug importation, .... Maybe the Republican debate will address these things.

I got this background from David Bromwich over at Huffington Post. This is the judge that dismissed the Valerie Plame suit against Cheney.

The federal judiciary is thickly planted now with judges who can be relied on for opinions that cooperate with the claims of arbitrary power. A staff lawyer for Kenneth Starr from 1995 through mid-1997, John D. Bates was appointed to the U.S. District Court by President G.W. Bush in December 2001. In December 2002, he dismissed the GAO lawsuit in Walker v. Cheney, which had sought information about the vice president's secret dealings on energy policy. The warrant for dismissal, in that case, turned on a failure to demonstrate "injury." Of course, oversight agencies perform their work in order to discover injuries; they can hardly name in advance and with perfect precision the injuries they seek to discover. But such are the arguments by which a political judge may give his decisions an appearance of standing above politics. In February 2006, after the resignation from the FISA court of James Robertson -- an unusual act of protest against the circumvention of FISA by unauthorized government wiretaps -- Judge Bates was picked by the new Chief Justice, John Roberts, to sit as the newest judge on the FISA court.

We can't get rid of federal judges through recall or election, but we can deal with state and local judges that must stand for re-election.

I have been guilty in the past of not paying attention to these elections, and apparently I am not alone, because almost all judges up for re-election win it. But I am prepared to give these votes a lot more weight in the future.

I also confess to being totally ignorant about Colorado judges. Which ones are on the ballot this year? Any candidates for removal? My standards would include judges who:
- egregiously let their political views leak into their decisions by useingconvoluted logic and strained legal interpretations to arrive at decisions that are plainly unjust or not in the public interest;
- refuse to recuse themselves in cases where they have ties to individuals or corporate interests involved in the decision;
- demonstrate incompetence by having cases frequently overturned on appeal based on law or logic.

I invite you all to submit your list of candidates for judges that should be carefully scrutinized at the next or succeeding elections. And maybe if we can send a shiver through the Colorado judiciary, we can transmit it as well to the Federal judges who cannot be removed except by impeachment or resignation.