By Dave Lindorff

If you are sitting in class taking a test, and you’ve chosen to sit
amongst your bone-headed, slacker friends, don’t turn to them for help
when you can’t figure out of any of the answers. They may all tell you
the same thing, but they’ll all be wrong.

By Dave Lindorff

President Obama, in his visit to China, held a “town meeting” with
Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the
value of freedom of information, saying that he is a “supporter of
non-censorship” and that open access to information was a “source of
strength.”

And yet America is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president
himself has gone to court to prevent the release of photographs of US
troops torturing captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. Talk
about censorship! But it goes way beyond just such crude, totalitarian
style control over information.

C-Span's Book TV, which can be watched on cable television on C-Span 2 or online at http://www.booktv.org plans to air a book event they recorded when I was in Miami, Florida.

Here's more info.

They'd told me they would run about 90 minutes, and so that was -- I think -- about what I did, including opening remarks and questions and answers. But their website says they're showing 1 hr and 7 min, which makes me suspect that they cut something out, most likely some of the Q&A. That's unfortunate.

I expect it to be a good show, in any case, and remember it as a good event. Please tell everyone to watch, record it, spread the word. Thanks!

Here's more about the book: "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union."

By David Swanson

The last time I was on Laura Flanders's GRIT tv I argued that the American public opposed the occupation of Afghanistan, but another guest -- some Washington, D.C., "progressive" -- argued that this had no relevance, since the American public didn't know anything about Afghanistan.

When the RAND Corporation held a forum on Afghanistan recently on Capitol Hill, Zbigniew Brzezinski claimed that it was uncontroversial that US troops had to stay in Afghanistan. I pointed him to polls of Americans, and he replied that Americans get fatigued and don't know any better.

When I spoke to a philosophy department at a university this month, a number of the professors objected to my advocacy of majority-rule on the grounds that experts often know best.

This is the latest from Bruce Gagnon's cable TV show, which is shown all across the state of Maine, and which you can ask to have shown in your part of the country.

Watch Video.

(It's way better quality than the internet requires, so please be very patient for it to start. Then ask your local cable station to play it.)

Here's the source with more information. And we expect smaller versions to be posted there soon for those of you not working at super computers.

By Dave Lindorff

With word being leaked out over the weekend that our Nobel Peace
Prize President is close to announcing plans to escalate the US troop
level in the Afghanistan War by 50%, we are about to have perhaps the
ultimate of ironies—a president announcing a big step-up in American
war-making on November 11, the day known around much of the Western
world as Armistice Day.

By David Swanson

Around the United States, peace groups are engaged in effective campaigns against proposed new military installations, local funding of weapons companies, and the routine destruction of the environment and of workers' health by such companies. Activists are building better media outlets, educating young people, educating old people, keeping military testing and recruiting out of schools, and discouraging the Army from building real-weapon video arcades in shopping malls. But when it comes to stopping our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, our citizens are less clear how to go about it.

Five Videos:

By Dave Lindorff

It would be easy to read too much into the few statewide races that
were decided last night, but I think it’s fair to say that the results
in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republican gubernatorial candidates
won--in New Jersey’s case knocking off a well-funded Democratic
incumbent--that the results were a blow to the Barack Obama/Rahm
Emanuel strategy of playing to the right, of avoiding confrontation in
Congress and of ignoring the progressive voters whose enthusiasm and
effort back in the 2008 campaign put Obama in office.

By Dave Lindorff

Country Joe McDonald
said it best in his iconic "Fixin' to Die" Rag: "Oh, it's one, two,
three, what are we fightin' for? Don't ask me. I don't give a damn." In
fact, we were fighting for nothing in Vietnam. It was a war that
started out because the US didn't want the Commies to win a battle in
the so-called Cold War, and even though it was on the farthest side of
the world, in a poor nation of peasants, even though they had been
struggling to throw off colonialism for years and we had simply become
the new colonists, no president dared to admit the obvious--we had no
business being there, and all the killing and dying had no point.