With the mainstream media’s steady firepower being directed basically in one direction, one would think that the big story of this presidential campaign season revolve around statements made by Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Chicago and how they politically impact on Barack Obama.

How essentially silent this same media has been concerning the statements of Reverend John Hagee of San Antonio. The only recent definitive study I have seen done on Hagee came from Hagee’s fellow Texan Lou Dubose in the excellent political journal he edits and writes for, The Washington Spectator.

Here is how the mainstream media has handled the Hagee matter when it has focused on it at all. There were two infamous statements that were discussed.

To paraphrase Harry Truman’s dictum that the only things we don’t yet know being the history we haven’t yet read, current headlines, in a comparative vein, are reminiscent of 1960.

Shortly before the beginning of the Democratic Convention of 1960 a group of prosperous looking Texans stood in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, the convention’s headquarters, and one said in a strong, determined accent with a notable Texas twang:

“That Kennedy is making me damned mad!”

The youthful Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy and the politically experienced majority leader of that same body, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, had exchanged plenty of verbal blows as each sought to win the Democratic nomination and the opportunity to face Vice President Richard M. Nixon in the fall presidential campaign.

On Fox News snippets were distributed throughout the mainstream media of Bill O’Reilly snarling with impending dyspepsia to Hillary Clinton over the sheer audacity of her statement that his federal income tax might be raised to 39 percent under a plan she would offer as president.

This is so prevalent under the crybaby yuppie mentality of the Bush-Cheney Administration, fostered by the neoconservatives at the top carrying the spears for the likes of the company Cheney continues to, in all reality, lead, Halliburton, along with Bechtel.

Then there are the revered telephone communication giants, and how Bush wants you to believe that U.S. intelligence sources will dry up post haste if we do not grant these giants immunity from prosecution.

The April 26 edition of the Toronto Star in an article by its environmental reporter Moira Welsh reveals, “The City of Toronto plans to pay its citizens to go green.”

Starting in May, a staff with the Live Green Toronto program, operating with $20 million in city funding for five years, will begin meeting with residents to discuss carbon-saving projects it will help subsidize.

Toronto Mayor David Miller has said that the “the plan’s success depends on residents creating change.”

An initial target has been projected of a 6 percent decrease in carbon emissions by 2012.

“We won’t meet our ambitious targets if we don’t have the support of every Torontonian and every Toronto-based business,” Miller exclaimed at the Green Living Show, a consumer show selling products with an environmental focus.

For any international historian who had been away for a time either on another planet or taking a Rip Van Winkle style nap, how would that person find contemporary America?

That individual would have found the “60 Minutes” interview time that CBS generously bestowed on Chief Justice Antonin Scalia highly informative. He presented the term “originalist” as defining his philosophy on the U.S. Constitution, but after listening to him in detail the question would have to be asked whether what he presented is unstead unvarnished fascism.

The first point that would have to be questioned was when segment moderator Leslie Stahl referred to Scalia, without any supporting evidence, as “one of the most brilliant” jurists we ever had serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Where are his credentials to justify such a glowing introductory comment?

Rush, your reign of gutter radio commentary has embedded you into the public consciousness as one of the ultimate slime wallowers in our nation’s history.

You show no sign of letting up. In fact, perhaps an air of desperation has finally reached you as the taste for your style of “political analysis” is receding.

To say that you embrace hypocrisy is letting you off far too gently. Yours is the mammoth category of hypocrisy that would have to be carried to the realm of infinity and beyond.

Remember Rush, you were the one who took the stern and unrelenting view that anyone caught consuming drugs under any circumstances should sustain one of two punishments: 1) execution; 2) be dismissed from America without ever receiving a future opportunity to return.

Andrew C. Revkin in a New York Times in a January 8, 2008 article reveals a daunting reporting on the melting surface of Greenland.

As stated by Revkin:

“For a lengthening string of warm years, a lacework of blue lakes and rivulets of meltwater have been spreading ever higher on the ice cap (cloaking Greenland). The melting surface darkens, absorbing up to four times as much energy from the sun as unmelted snow, which reflects sunlight. Natural drainpipes called moulins carry water from the surface into the depths, in some places reaching bedrock. The process slightly, but measurably, lubricates and accelerates the grinding passage of ice toward the sea.”

The so-called debate presented in Philadelphia this week consisting of moderators George Stephanopoulous and Charlie Gibson substituted what should have been a serious analysis of the major topics facing America and the globe and substituted frivolity and absurdity, reducing the issue of presidential politics to a laughable side show.

The major issues were the ones that were not tackled at all.

People throughout the world would like to know what will be done about a war of occupation launched on provable lies, chiefly that Saddam Hussein must be stopped before he can wage nuclear war on America with weapons he did not possess, and that according to the respected British journal Lancet has documented that over 1.2 million Iraqi lives have been lost.

As the right that has bellyached ad nauseum about Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his comments need to be taken in context and analyzed in a way that they will never do. They thrive on snippets and howls with no analysis.

One thing we do know. Jeremiah Wright is responsible for no deaths. If even such a possibility existed the Fox Fixed News hordes would have tumbled on the information by now, whether true or not.

One thing we do know and the mainstream media has run away from this simple and unavoidable truth in the same manner that they have pounced on virtually every snippet, comment or sigh emanating from Jeremiah Wright’s career in the pulpit.

Those attempting to determine the Obama factor in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential sweepstakes have an easy road to travel.

It has puzzled some how Hillary Clinton, ordained by most of the mainstream media as being the winner before the initial competition in the form of the Iowa Caucuses occurred, based on numbers appears well on her way to being upset by Barack Obama, a recent Illinois state legislator who did not enter major national politics before being elected to the U.S. Senate just four short years ago.

Obama’s meteoric rise is tied into amateurish blundering by a Clinton campaign that received such mainstream media boosting that important columnists and commentators interviewed sang Clinton’s early debate performances and declared that she was winning them regularly and decisively.

Does the U.S. Constitution hold any meaning at all in today’s Bush-Cheney neoconservative Washington?

The answer that the politically alert are well aware of is that the answer is a loud and highly resounding “No”!

Why does the Constitution hold no current meaning? That answer is simple to those who have been paying attention. The Constitution holds no meaning because it has been replaced by Washington’s speedy new way of doing business.

For those who have not been paying attention the Constitution has been scrapped for executive decrees, so many of which are imposed by George W. Bush signing statements. Who cares what the letter and the spirit of legislation involves.

Did I get my Andy Warhol-allotted 15 minutes of fame when I was singled out by a veteran Los Angeles Times political reporter?

It was a dubious mention and one that we will see was delivered by someone who might well take offense to the article I wrote that resulted in my brief moment in the big time of political journalism by being singled out by Robert Salladay, then Sacramento Capitol reporter who covered Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger along with other assignments, including the 2000 presidential recount and the 2003 California recount that brought Schwarzenegger to power.

I happened to stumble on Salladay’s mention of me as well as a particular column I wrote for the Political Cortex site during a routine Google search. The mention and reference to my column appeared in the October 11, 2006 edition of Salladay’s Internet column Political Muscle.

Vermont has always been a state where citizens valued freedom and independent thought.

A compelling belief in freedom and the importance of following the U.S. Constitution have served as motivations for the citizens of Brattleboro, Vermont.

A new proposal in the township of Brattleboro to authorize local law enforcement to arrest Bush and Cheney will be voted on in the coming weeks at a town hall meeting.

Yesterday, February 20, the New Hampshire State House held an impeachment hearing, which was flooded by activists and community members insisting that their state legislature take action.

Senator McCain, while you criticize Barack Obama as too “inexperienced” to become America’s commander in chief we notice of what you have been doing. You have taken the baton from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and are using terrorism at every turn to attempt to frighten the electorate with steady 9/11 exhortations.

We noticed you singing with supreme gusto “Bomb Iran” with the kind of zeal indicative of someone serious about what he is singing.

Senator McCain, according to that reliable barometer, our National Debt Clock in Times Square, we currently stand ever closer to the at one time unimagined precipice of $9.3 trillion en route to a staggering $10 trillion figure.

Thank you, U.S. Senate for your latest cave in to the Bush-Cheney ongoing dictatorship!

It isn’t enough to endorse wire tapping.

Let’s go ahead and render the huge corporations that do it an invulnerable status. Why should they be subjected to troublesome lawsuits for following the old John McCain maxim of “We are at war”! meaning perpetual war for perpetual peace?

If we intend to be at war in Iraq for at least 100 years then it makes logical sense to snoop on citizens in the very country whose symbol of freedom you have guaranteed to export all over the world!

Think of all the money the phone companies can make snooping on people throughout the entire world, all in the name of preserving American freedom!

It is interesting, Senator McCain, how you, in an effort to get more Republicans aboard your presidential ship, how you push two buttons you hope will achieve immediate success: 1) accusing the Democrats of “surrender”; 2) invoking the name of Ronald Reagan as you proclaim yourself to have been an early foot soldier in the “Reagan Revolution.”

Since you brought up the subject of surrender, let us explore it with you and Reagan. Beginning with yourself, what about that disgraceful 2000 Republican primary campaign in South Carolina when the forces of George W. Bush, led by Karl Rove, attacked your wife as a harlot, attacked your mental stability, and used stereotypical racism by alleging that you had a “black” daughter, meaning the little girl you adopted from Bangladesh?

The Republican attack machine has long featured the big lie technique that Joseph Goebbels used during the reign of terror of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

Under the Lee Atwater and latterly Karl Rove technique words, as exemplified in George Orwell’s prescient masterwork “1984”, are instruments to be used for selfish political gain. Their meanings are essentially irrelevant but for their sword-like thrust in making political points.

For instance, while Senator John McCain becomes demagogue of the moment for the Republican Party attack machine in asserting that Democratic candidates seeking the presidency are advocating “surrender in the Iraq War” the first point to encounter is the definition of the word “surrender.” In fact, McCain has asserted that America should remain in Iraq for perhaps “one hundred years” if necessary to complete its mission.

Johann Hari in a revealing piece on Senator John McCain of Arizona in London’s Independent January 24 sounded an astute cautionary message advising voters to go beyond thirty second spots and television advertising to learn his real identity:

“If we don’t start warning that the Real McCain is not the Real McCoy, we might sleepwalk into four more years of Republicanism.”

Hari’s warning should be evaluated in the wake of the latest example of New York Times Kool-Aid drinking. It will be recalled that not that many years ago the journal that states it runs “all the news that’s fit to print” got dizzy on Kool-Aid manufactured by noted fraud Ahmed Chalibi, who fed as fact to Time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Judith Miller.

Ah, how much piety was in the air with Republicans such as Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde, both of whom were marital philanderers, when they sought along with their similarly self-righteous party colleagues to remove Bill Clinton from the presidency.

The key question for these self-righteous Republicans was: “Did Clinton lie?” The corollary was that if President Bill Clinton lied on the subject of whether or not he had sex with White House intern Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office then grounds for impeachment existed.

It is doubtful that thoughts of the stains on Lewinsky’s blue dress have left the “chaste conscience” of “moralist” Ann Coulter for a single waking minute since the Clinton-Lewinsky liaison occurred.

What a heady time it was! The Reagan Revolution had begun with his election in 1980 and there was one hugely symbolic, meaningful act that the new regime was delighted to perform to show that the old regime had gone and a new philosophy had emerged.

The newly arrived Reagan team could hardly wait to have functionaries climb onto the White House roof and remove all those absurd solar energy collectors that the man they considered the big bad wolf of pessimists, President Jimmy Carter, had installed, warning all the while about energy depletion and the severed consequences that this held not only for America but the entire planet.

Fresh and encouraging news is in the air in my home state of Washington regarding the supreme issue that stands out above all others.

What is the message that stands above all others on the issue of saving America and ending the trashing of the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution?

That message is impeachment. No Senator Harry Reid, No Speaker Nancy Pelosi, you are both wrong when you state that impeachment is a political decision to be reached or, in this case, ignored by elected representatives.

Read the Constitution and you will see that a different standard applies. A chief executive and vice president take oaths to preserve and defend the Constitution. They take oaths to see “that the laws are faithfully executed.”

We know from past experiences that the very name of Diebold, the major voting machine corporation, strikes horror in the hearts and minds of progressives. How about hearing that 81% of the votes in the recently concluded New Hampshire Primary rested in Diebold’s hands?

Who can ever forget that letter from Diebold CEO Wally O’Dell prior to the 2004 election! O’Dell stated bluntly that he would help do whatever it took to insure a presidential victory for George W. Bush.

When pressed about the possible consequences of such a statement considering the pivotal position Diebold held in the 2004 vote counting, O’Dell delivered a typical “ah shucks” response of, “Well now, I didn’t mean we’d do just anything!”

How touching it is to hear John McCain along with Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee talk from New Hampshire tonight about the need for change in Washington.

Now who has been in power for the last seven years?

How touching it was to hear McCain talk about victory in Iraq and restoring fiscal responsibility, along with speaking glowingly about the surge working!

The death numbers are still rising in Iraq, Senator McCain, no matter how you spin the surge and what kind of victory are you talking about when the majority of the Iraqis want us to leave and the refugee problem has become so staggering that some reports indicate it is at or near the 5 million mark.

Early in her presidential effort Hillary Clinton made it abundantly clear that husband Bill would play a major role in her administration should she be elected to lead America. This should come as no surprise and would double the danger potential of progressives seeking change.

One of the pivotal Bill Clinton appearances came not in America but in England, when he attended a Labour Party conference. After the British people had made a strong statement by mounting the most impressive grassroots demonstration I ever saw, a massive demonstration at Hyde Park involving people coming from all around the United Kingdom, Labourites took notice.

It is nice occasionally in the current climate of political ozone where the idea on the part of so many is to spin lies repetitiously long enough to be accepted as truth to read something with which one can agree.

As someone who started my professional career in journalism, it grieves me to say that I emphatically agree with a statement I read the other day calling 2007 the most pathetic one yet for the mainstream media, in short what passes for news.

The establishment is very much alive and continuing to create suffocating ozone by the minute. A classic example was a syndicated Associated Press article by Terence Hunt that appeared December 21 in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.