By Dave Lindorff

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Federal District Court
Judge Fernando Gaitan of the Missouri Western District Court have at
least two things in common: they are both appointees of President
Ronald Reagan, and they both think it’s just fine for the US to execute
innocent people. The same can be said for Judge C. Arlen Beam of the
8th Circuit Court of Appeals.

In a recent dissent in a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling ordering a habeas
hearing in federal court for South Carolina death row inmate Troy
Anthony Davis, a man slated to die after being convicted for the murder
of an off-duty Savannah police officer, Scalia wrote, “This court has
never held that the constitution forbids the execution of a convicted
defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to
convince a habeas court that he is `actually’ innocent.”

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.

By Dave Lindorff

Of course I could be wrong. Congress could turn around and pass
some cockamamie scheme to kick the issue of health care reform down the
road, offering some kind of minimal insurance coverage to a few million
more people, and cracking down on this or that particularly egregious
health provider rip-off, and then staging a “mission accomplished”
photo op.

But real health care reform of the kind that Democratic candidates
were promising during last year’s presidential campaign is dead, killed
by the timidity of the promiser-in-chief, President Barack Obama (and
by the massive corruption of the Democrats in Congress, who hav e
accepted the tainted coin of the health care industry).

By Dave Lindorff

George Santayana once famously said, “Those who cannot learn from
history are doomed to repeat it.” But what about those who don’t just
ignore history, but who hire and take counsel from those who committed
historic follies in the past?

Back in November 1999, Congress passed legislation pushed by then
Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX), rescinding the Depression-era Glass-Steagall
Act. The measure, backed by the Clinton administration, and
overwhelmingly passed by the Senate (90-8) and the House (362-57),
opened the way for banks to merge with investment banks and insurance
companies, and led directly to the current financial cataclysm.

By Dave Lindorff

Amid the news that retail sales have fallen for the fourth straight
month, that housing prices continue to slump, and that another 600,000
workers were laid off in the month of January—the largest number in one
month since 1974—comes word from some experts in the business community that things are not going to be getting better soon, and that when they
do, they will not get back to the way things were in 2006 or early
2007, before the recession began.

In an interview I did for the trade publication Investment Management Weekly
on Thursday, Putnam Investments’ global asset allocation head Jeffrey
Knight said that while the stimulus could “help to prevent a Great
Depression sequel,” at the same time “Those who measure prosperity
against the Faustian opulence of the last 10 years may find that
stability, equilibrium and even recovery will still feel like a deep
depression.”

By Dave Lindorff

If an article by Gareth Porter in run by InterPress
is correct that CentCom Commander Gen. David Petraeus and Iraq
Commander Gen. Ray Odierno, backed by a group of lower-ranking
generals, are planning to mount a public campaign to try and undermine
President Obama’s plan for a withdrawal from Iraq in 16 months, Obama
needs to act fast and nip this dangerous act of insubordination in the
bud.

By Dave Lindorff

President Barack Obama and his economic team are being careful to
couch all their talk about economic stimulus programs and bank bailout
programs in warnings that the economic downturn is serious and that it
will take considerable time to bounce back.

By Dave Lindorff

A CBS/Associated Press story
yesterday reported that the man who runs the Pentagon’s anti-missile
program, Lt. Gen. Henry Obering III, had warned incoming
President-elect Barack Obama that any reversal of Bush/Cheney
administration plans to install anti-ballistic missile missiles in
Poland would “severely hurt” American interests.

It was a classic “stupid” story of the type that we now expect to
get from our corporate media—basically a regurgitation of the statement
of one self-interested official, backed up by a few supporting quotes
from other government officials, and the usual “anonymous” official
sources, and lacking any context or opposing viewpoints.

By Dave Lindorff

There are a number of reasons why the Puerto Rican Democratic primary election set for this coming Sunday won’t matter, in terms of Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for the party’s nomination.

The main one is that she’s not going to get the big vote that she has been predicting.

Clinton, trailing Obama by about 400,000 votes nationwide with only three primaries to go, is fantasizing that she will win the lion’s share of one million Puerto Rican votes, which would put her in the lead for the nomination in terms of the popular vote, though not in the delegate count.

By Dave Lindorff

Before the West Virginia primary vote on Tuesday, it was a foregone conclusion that Hillary Clinton would sweep the state, perhaps by over 70 percent. In the event, she came close to that, with 68 percent of the vote. Now that the vote has happened, Clinton and a corporate media anxious to spin out the ratings-boosting contest as long as possible, are arguing that Obama is in trouble.

It is true that twenty percent of those voting for Clinton in this almost lily-white, low-income, low-education state said they voted for her on the basis of race, which is to say they wouldn't vote for a black man. Theirs was a vote Clinton has actively pursued. Forty percent of her backers said they would not vote for Obama in the general election if he were the Democratic candidate.