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AUSTIN -- Never say this is not a great nation. A campaign in which Jesse Ventura took offense at someone else's behavior: Mr. Etiquette, the sensitive male. Poor Charlton Heston, suffering from Alzheimer's disease, no shame to him, shipped about the country, urging us all to buy more guns while being held up by supporters on each arm. Both candidates for governor in California capable of inducing brain damage in anyone luckless enough to listen to them speak. Another great year!

As a veteran of many an electoral defeat at the polls, may I remind you of the proper Texan attitude toward slaughter at the polls. A few years before Billie Carr died this September at age 74, a friend called to ask how she was doing. "Well," she said, "They just impeached my boy up in Washington, there's not a Democrat left in statewide office in Texas, the Republicans have taken every judgeship in Harris County, and yesterday, I found out I have cancer." Pause. "I think I'll go out and get a pregnancy test because with my luck, it'll come back positive."

The silver lining: Maybe at last we can finally retire that awful phrase that has been flapping its way through the newspaper headlines since the Clinton campaign of 1992, "It's the economy, stupid."

No, it's not the economy, stupid. If it were the economy, stupid, then House Speaker Dennis Hastert would be yielding his chair to Dick Gephardt, and George Bush would be deluged in rotten cabbages every time he appeared in public.

The economy, stupid? Let's take a look.

The markets? Down, down, down. During Bush's term, the Dow has gone from 10,578.20 on Jan. 22, 2001, to 8,397.03 on Oct. 31, 2002 -- a decline of 20.6 percent. Unemployment? Up, up, up. January 2001 to October 2002, nonfarm payrolls have fallen by 1.49 million, as the jobless rate has jumped in Bush's term from 4.2 percent to 5.7

Basic economic indicators? Teetering between indifferent and terrifying. Gross domestic product, which averaged a 3.1 percent annual growth rate in the first seven quarters under Clinton, compared with a 1.4 percent average in the same period under Bush.

AUSTIN, Texas -- So the new guy in charge of reforming the accounting industry himself sat on the board of a company now being investigated for fraud, and when that company's outside auditors complained about accounting irregularities, he voted to fire them. This is just peachy.

Why don't we add Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers to the new accounting oversight board, as well?

It's not as though it weren't already painfully clear the Bush administration is both opposing and undermining all efforts to clean up corporate corruption, but do they really have to make a mockery of them, as well?

The headline in The Wall Street Journal read, "Criticism Mounts as Pitt Launches Probe of Himself." SEC chairman Harvey Pitt has just made himself immortal: Pitt, inventor of the self-probe. It sounds painfully rectal.

This is obscene. Where are the big fish on this one? We used to say of Bush in Texas, "He doesn't care about the topwaters." The topwaters are the bitty fish that swim on the top of the pond; Bush always worked for the big fish that swim underneath.

About a day before I decided to write this me and a couple friends were having a discussion about the nature of the columbus activist community. A little joke came up between us where we gave our activist community a motto:"Welcome to Columbus! Please tone it down a little!" Now we all had a good laugh over this statement about what we consider to be the lack of tactical radicalism within our activist community here in Columbus, Ohio, but this is a very serious matter or at least I feel it is and it has compeled me to write this critique.

This issue contains articles by Bob Fitrakis, Norman Solomon, Alexander Cockburn, Molly Ivins, Harvey Wasserman and others that address the most important anti-war issues of the day.

Additional topics include: the death penalty, campaign finance, and domestic government violence
PORTLAND, Ore. -- My, what fun we are having this festive fall campaign season. Ads running coast to coast informing us that if the other guy wins the election, pestilence will fall upon the land, weevils will eat the corn, our children will be sacrificed to Baal, and we'll all be afflicted with piles. It makes me miss the warm, positive, upbeat, people-loving candidates of yesteryear. Like Richard Nixon.

Tough times for those of us who are just little rays of sunshine all the damn time. I was trying to think of a single area where the country appears to be headed in the right direction.

The economy? Flop. Health care? Disaster. Homeland security? The director of the CIA says we're about to be attacked again. Foreign policy? Even our allies are starting to hate us. The environment? Please.

Meanwhile, our only president continues to insist that we need to go bomb Iraq, as he so lucidly explained the other day, "for the sake of peace." We once had a war to end war, but we've never actually tried a war for peace before.

We live in the "blowback" years. By blowback we mean, what goes around comes around. Unforeseen consequences, or foreseen but ignored. Unleash the mujahiddeen on the Soviets in Afghanistan, and you end up with Osama bin Laden. Blowback always comes as a shock, because the art of politics is to separate actions from consequences.

A nation always on the war path mans a nation always under arms and a country to which the war is always coming home -- a potent minority in the form of psychically maimed people, violence-prone drunks, domestic abusers, drug addicts and basket cases. This summer, before John Muhammad and John Lee Malvo embarked on their terrible jihad, the whole issue of Wars Coming Home had turned red hot with the murders and suicides in Fort Bragg, N.C.

On June 11 Sgt. 1st Class Rigoberto Nieves, 32, of the 3rd Special Forces Group, shot his 28-year-old wife Teresa, and then himself, in their bedroom, as Teresa’s sister and other relatives sat downstairs. He had returned from Afghanistan only two days before, having requested leave to resolve "personal issues"

The memorial at Kent State University was the perfect place to walk and talk with Paul Wellstone. He was hurting from an old college wrestling injury, and perhaps, though we didn't know it then, from the onset of MS. So he could barely move around. But what walking he could do, he did with grace. An athlete in pain.

Paul was also, as always, sharp and committed. We were awaiting our turns to speak to an energetic band of young citizen activists, fresh out of college. They were bright, progressive environmentalists, full of vim and promise, a welcome island in the 1990s sea of Clintonian materialism.

As we circled the memorial we found ourselves close to tears. When this official butchery happened, we were both active in the movement against the war in Vietnam. The 1970 shooting, engineered by Richard Nixon and Ohio Gov. James A. Rhodes, sent a message: you could be killed.

Marketing a war is serious business. And no product requires better brand names than one that squanders vast quantities of resources while intentionally killing large numbers of people.

The American trend of euphemistic fog for such enterprises began several decades ago. It's very old news that the federal government no longer has a department or a budget named "war." Now, it's all called "defense," a word with a strong aura of inherent justification. The sly effectiveness of the labeling switch can be gauged by the fact that many opponents of reckless military spending nevertheless constantly refer to it as "defense" spending.

During the past dozen years, the intersection between two avenues, Pennsylvania and Madison, has given rise to media cross-promotion that increasingly sanitizes the organized mass destruction known as warfare.

The first Bush administration enhanced the public-relations techniques for U.S. military actions by "choosing operation names that were calculated to shape political perceptions," linguist Geoff Nunberg recalls. The invasion of Panama in December 1989 went forward under the
SAN FRANCISCO -- He was the rarest of all rare breeds -- a mensch from Minnesota. But this is not a column about Paul Wellstone. No one has to wonder for a minute what he would have wanted, "What would Wellstone do?" The answer all but roars back, "Don't mourn, organize!"

The contrast between Paul's passionate populism and this dreary mid-term election is as sad as his death. There's many a contest between political pygmies this year -- we're down to seeds and stems again --- but even in proud Texas we have to admit that this year's palm for nose-holding voting must go to California. Not to overstate, two of the most titanically unattractive candidates in the history of time -- Gray Davis and Bill Simon -- are vying for the governorship. A new nadir in modern politics. How we got from the Lincoln-Douglas debates to this -- or what we ever did to deserve it -- is unclear. The debate between Davis and Simon raised the always-timely question: Is God punishing us?

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