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.

By Dave Lindorff

It’s not as much of a travesty as when Henry Kissinger, a war criminal of the first order who was an architect of the latter stages of the Indochina War, and was personally responsible for the slaughter of well over a million innocent people, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, while that war was still raging, but the awarding of the latest Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama is travesty enough.

We’re talking about a man whose practically first act upon taking office early this year was to escalate the ugly and pointless war in Afghanistan with the addition of some 20,000 troops, and who, even as the Nobel committee was discussing his award, was meeting with his military and political advisors to consider expanding that war even further, both in Afghanistan and across the border into Pakistan.

By Dave Lindorff

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and other big city cops
are calling for a new system of “citizen watch” programs, allegedly to
help them spot hidden terrorists. I view this new call for a nation of
private spies with a deep suspicion born of experience with the LAPD
and its historic penchant for spying on law-abiding residents of that
city.

Let's Try Democracy By David Swanson, BlackCommentator.com Columnist

This is the second of three excerpts from Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories Press) by David Swanson published here by the kind permission of the publisher.

Click here to read any of the commentaries in this series.

In places where we are not already protected, or where we have been shown to be vulnerable over the last eight years or before, legislation and amendments can be used to expand our existing rights and establish entirely new ones. All of our rights, new and old, should be properly protected by placing violations of them in the criminal code.

1. The Right to Vote

By Dave Lindorff

Some years ago, my wife and I, together with our young daughter,
took a circuitous summer train trip through France, Italy, Austria and
Germany. The last leg was an overnight express from Berlin that
deposited us at the Gare du Nord in Paris just at sunrise. Feeling
washed out from the ride, we made our separate ways to the facilities.
I was standing at the urinal with a bunch of other men, relieving
myself, when I heard this awful groaning coming from a stall. The
groaning grew louder and more painful sounding. Some guy was obviously
having a terrible time with his bowels. The agony continued, to the
point that we who were by now washing our hands at the sinks were
looking at each other in puzzlement, wondering what was going on. I
even wondered if someone should ask if the poor wretch if he needed
help.

Let's Try Democracy By David Swanson, BlackCommentator.com Columnist

We welcome David Swanson as a BC columnist. We have publishing his writings a number of times in the past and look forward to what he will be writing in the future.
This first column by Mr. Swanson is the first of three excerpts from Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories Press) by David Swanson published here by the kind permission of the publisher.

According to the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The men who put their signatures to those words sought to endow each other with those rights, and those rights can be gained or lost. And since that day, people around the world have imagined, created, and struggled for a great many additional rights as well.

By David Swanson

The U.S. Department of Justice says that alcohol plays a pivotal role in two-thirds of all cases of violence against an intimate (a spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend), and blames alcohol for contributing to 100,000 sexual assaults against young people every year. That's right, alcohol hurts more people than al Qaeda.

Of course, alcohol does not always lead every consumer of it to violence. Most people who drink alcohol don't hurt anyone. But a large percentage of those who do get violent have been drinking alcohol. Should we ban it? We tried that once with miserable results, and we've banned other substances with equally bad outcomes.

By Dave Lindorff

Let me state from the get-go that I'm no opponent of gun ownership
(got my first rifle at the age of 12 and am still a crack shot). But
something weird is going on when you have guys wandering around a
political rally or protest site with pistols strapped to their thighs,
or semi-automatic assault rifles strapped brazenly to their backs, as
has been happening outside of venues where President Obama is speaking.

Before we get to the legal issues here, I just want to paint you a mental picture:

By Dave Lindorff

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party
and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly
bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and
ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party,
shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the
American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who
thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for
progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip
of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.