Language always comes with what is called "framing." Every word is defined relative to a conceptual framework. If you have something like "revolt," that implies a population that is being ruled unfairly, or assumes it is being ruled unfairly, and that they are throwing off their rulers, which would be considered a good thing. That's a frame.

If you then add the word "voter" in front of "revolt," you get a metaphorical meaning saying that the voters are the oppressed people, the governor is the oppressive ruler, that they have ousted him and this is a good thing and all things are good now. All of that comes up when you see a headline like "voter revolt" — something that most people read and never notice. But these things can be affected by reporters and very often, by the campaign people themselves.

Q: Why do conservatives appear to be so much better at framing?

A: Because they've put billions of dollars into it. Over the last 30 years their think tanks have made a heavy investment in ideas and in language. In 1970, [Supreme Court Justice] Lewis Powell wrote a fateful memo to the National Chamber of Commerce saying that all of our best students are becoming anti-business because of the Vietnam War, and that we needed to do something about it. Powell's agenda included getting wealthy conservatives to set up professorships, setting up institutes on and off campus where intellectuals would write books from a conservative business perspective, and setting up think tanks. He outlined the whole thing in 1970. They set up the Heritage Foundation in 1973, and the Manhattan Institute after that. [There are many others, including the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute at Stanford, which date from the 1940s.]

And now, as the New York Times Magazine quoted Paul Weyrich, who started the Heritage Foundation, they have 1,500 conservative radio talk show hosts. They have a huge, very good operation, and they understand their own moral system. They understand what unites conservatives, and they understand how to talk about it, and they are constantly updating their research on how best to express their ideas.

Q: Why haven't progressives done the same thing?

A: There's a systematic reason for that. You can see it in the way that conservative foundations and progressive foundations work. Conservative foundations give large block grants year after year to their think tanks. They say, 'Here's several million dollars, do what you need to do.' And basically, they build infrastructure, they build TV studios, hire intellectuals, set aside money to buy a lot of books to get them on the best-seller lists, hire research assistants for their intellectuals so they do well on TV, and hire agents to put them on TV. They do all of that. Why? Because the conservative moral system, which I analyzed in "Moral Politics," has as its highest value preserving and defending the "strict father" system itself. And that means building infrastructure. As businessmen, they know how to do this very well.

Meanwhile, liberals' conceptual system of the "nurturant parent" has as its highest value helping individuals who need help. The progressive foundations and donors give their money to a variety of grassroots organizations. They say, 'We're giving you $25,000, but don't waste a penny of it. Make sure it all goes to the cause, don't use it for administration, communication, infrastructure, or career development.' So there's actually a structural reason built into the worldviews that explains why conservatives have done better.

Q: You've said that progressives should never use the phrase "war on terror" — why?

A: There are two reasons for that. Let's start with "terror." Terror is a general state, and it's internal to a person. Terror is not the person we're fighting, the "terrorist." The word terror activates your fear, and fear activates the strict father model, which is what conservatives want. The "war on terror" is not about stopping you from being afraid, it's about making you afraid.

Frames trump facts. The facts alone will not set you free. You have to reframe the issues before the facts can become meaningful and powerful.

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Asked whether such results meant pornography was good for children, Dr McKee said: "I think you come there to an issue we can't answer - should children who are 16-years-old be allowed to be sexual?"

An ownership society is a society that values responsibility, liberty, and property. An ownership society empowers individuals by freeing them from dependence on government handouts and making them owners instead, in control of their own lives and destinies. In the ownership society, patients control their own health care, parents control their own children's education, and workers control their retirement savings.

Each year, the U.S. government spends more than $30 billion on the drug war and arrests more than 1.5 million people on drug-related charges. More than 318,000 people are now behind bars in the U.S. for drug violations. This is more than the total number of people incarcerated for all crimes in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined.

George W. Bush promised us a foreign policy with humility. Instead, he has brought us humiliation in the eyes of the world.

He promised to "restore honor and integrity to the White House." Instead, he has brought deep dishonor to our country and built a durable reputation as the most dishonest President since Richard Nixon.

Honor? He decided not to honor the Geneva Convention. Just as he would not honor the United Nations, international treaties, the opinions of our allies, the role of Congress and the courts, or what Jefferson described as "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind." He did not honor the advice, experience and judgment of our military leaders in designing his invasion of Iraq. And now he will not honor our fallen dead by attending any funerals or even by permitting photos of their flag-draped coffins.

How did we get from September 12th , 2001, when a leading French newspaper ran a giant headline with the words "We Are All Americans Now" and when we had the good will and empathy of all the world -- to the horror that we all felt in witnessing the pictures of torture in Abu Ghraib.

To begin with, from its earliest days in power, this administration sought to radically destroy the foreign policy consensus that had guided America since the end of World War II. The long successful strategy of containment was abandoned in favor of the new strategy of "preemption." And what they meant by preemption was not the inherent right of any nation to act preemptively against an imminent threat to its national security, but rather an exotic new approach that asserted a unique and unilateral U.S. right to ignore international law wherever it wished to do so and take military action against any nation, even in circumstances where there was no imminent threat. All that is required, in the view of Bush's team is the mere assertion of a possible, future threat - and the assertion need be made by only one person, the President.

More disturbing still was their frequent use of the word "dominance" to describe their strategic goal, because an American policy of dominance is as repugnant to the rest of the world as the ugly dominance of the helpless, naked Iraqi prisoners has been to the American people. Dominance is as dominance does.

Dominance is not really a strategic policy or political philosophy at all. It is a seductive illusion that tempts the powerful to satiate their hunger for more power still by striking a Faustian bargain. And as always happens - sooner or later - to those who shake hands with the devil, they find out too late that what they have given up in the bargain is their soul.

• Burning jet fuel can not melt the kind of steel the WTC was made of. It isn't remotely hot enough, even if there's a lot of it. Nobody's been able to demonstrate anything different.
• More than a month after the incident, while the debris was being removed, pools of molten steel were found in the basement of the two towers, where they connected with the bedrock. As well as under the collapsed WTC7 building. Again, burning jet fluid and office papers and collapsing buildings can not have caused that. At least not according to any currently known natural law.
• Certain high-powered military incendiaries can do that. Thermite, it is called. It would have to have been placed in those basements, though.
• Three buildings collapsed, despite that the two of them got hit in very different ways by planes, and the last one wasn't hit. Doesn't match anything that is known about the structure and stability of such buildings. For that matter, the two buildings hit did what they were expected to do, without structural damage. Until they suddenly collapsed.
• Various engineers and demolition experts stated that it had all the signs of being controlled demolitions. Most of them withdrew their statements later, without much explanation for their change of mind.
• Ironically, a company called "Controlled Demolition, Inc." was given the contract ...of cleaning up, presumably. They were the same people contracted for the Oklahoma federal building.
• The recovered steel was shipped to China, very quickly, before any analysis was completed, of how the buildings might have collapsed.
• The owner of the buildings prepared to cash in on his six weeks old insurance policy. (Although he just realized that he can only cash in the $3.5 billion policy once, rather than the twice he expected)
• Somebody made a killing in the stock market on predicting the whole event, and you're asked to believe that it wasn't possible to find out who.

The UN betrayed Iraq by becoming the political arm of US occupation. Now it must redeem itself

Can we please stop calling it a quagmire? The United States isn't mired in a bog in Iraq, or a marsh; it is free-falling off a cliff. The only question now is: who will follow the Bush clan off this precipice, and who will refuse to jump?

More and more are, thankfully, choosing the second option. The last month of US aggression in Iraq has inspired what can only be described as a mutiny: waves of soldiers, workers and politicians under the command of the US occupation authority suddenly refusing to follow orders and abandoning their posts. First Spain announced that it would withdraw its troops, then Honduras, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Kazakhstan. South Korean and Bulgarian troops were pulled back to their bases, while New Zealand is withdrawing its engineers. El Salvador, Norway, the Netherlands and Thailand will likely be next.

[...]

There is a way that the UN can redeem itself in Iraq: it could choose to join the mutiny, further isolating the United States. This would help to force Washington to hand over real power - ultimately to Iraqis, but first to a multilateral coalition that did not participate in the invasion and occupation and would have the credibility to oversee direct elections. This could work, but only through a process that fiercely protects Iraq's sovereignty.

Edmonds said she was hired to retranslate material that was collected prior to Sept. 11 to determine if anything was missed in the translations that related to the plot. In her review, Edmonds said the documents clearly showed that the Sept. 11 hijackers were in the country and plotting to use airplanes as missiles. The documents also included information relating to their financial activities. Edmonds said she could not comment in detail because she has been under a Justice Department gag order since October 2002. Edmonds has testified before the Sept. 11 commission, the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.

FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds, was offered a substantial raise and a full time job in order to not go public that she had been asked by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to retranslate and adjust the translations of [terrorist] subject intercepts that had been received before September 11, 2001 by the FBI and CIA.

"Attorney General John Ashcroft told me 'he was invoking State Secret Privilege and National Security' when I told the FBI I wanted to go public with what I had translated from the pre 9-11 intercepts." [...]

"I appeared once on CBS 60 Minutes but I have been silenced by Mr. Ashcroft, the FBI follows me, and I was threatened with jail in 2002 if I went public"

What can we do about it? Just about everything.

The IMF is hardly more than a branch of the Treasury Department. Economist Jagdish Bhagwati, no radical, refers to the IMF- Treasury-Wall St complex that is a core part of de facto world government. The Treasury Department is part of the US government. If we had anything remotely resembling a democratic culture, actions of the government would be under the control of citizens, which would mean that citizens have to at the very least know something about them. And beyond that, we would have mechanisms to engage in political action. And in a more democratic society the third component, Wall St., would not exist in anything remotely like its present form, and what would exist would be under popular democratic control.

But any of this requires constructing the basis for democratic participation, which has been very badly eroded in the US, creating what's often called a "democratic deficit" when we refer to others -- in our own case, a huge democratic deficit.

People in the more civilized sectors of the world (what we call "the third world," or the "developing countries") often burst out laughing when they witness an election in which the choices are two men from very wealthy families with plenty of clout in the very narrow political system, who went to the same elite university and even joined the same secret society to be socialized into the manners and attitudes of the rulers, and who are able to participate in the election because they have massive funding from highly concentrated sectors of unaccountable power that cast over society the shadow called "politics," as John Dewey put it.

But it's up to us whether we want to tolerate this, and if we could begin to approach the level of democracy of, say, Brazil, we could do quite a lot about IMF conditionalities. And it doesn't happen by just showing up once every four years to participate in an "election".

"Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Thursday that Congress should make President Bush's tax cuts permanent and cover the $1 trillion price by trimming future benefits in Social Security and other entitlement programs."

Well, for starters, George Bush and John Kerry are both graduates of Yale University – that long-heralded bastion of the Eastern establishment. In addition, each of these men were members of Skull & Bones, the most exclusive secret society/fraternity in America, and prime breeding ground for the CIA and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

But wait; there’s more. John Kerry’s wife, Teresa, was formerly married to Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz. Guess what college he attended. Answer: Yale. And guess what notorious fraternity he pledged to. Skull & Bones! Now ask yourself: what are the odds that both presidential candidates went to the same school, belonged to the same secret society, and that one of their wives was married to TWO different Skull & Bonesmen? It’s infinitesimal … off the charts.

"It is easier to have freedom of thought in a concentration camp than in America today."

"So said Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In 1970 he won the Nobel Prize for literature and is the author of a number of books that are insightful, both on the nature of the Russian political system and of the human psyche when placed in situations of extreme hardship. In 1974 he fled Russian persecution for the land of the free and the home of the brave. To his astonishment he discovered a land where freedom of thought was no greater than in Russia. There was a difference only in the nature of the restrictions on his freedom of thought not on the extent. Of course the natural response is to say "like it or leave it", that is, if he thinks it is so crook then leave (which is actually what he did, returning to his native Russia after the fall of communism.) Our friends, however, are not the ones that tell us what we want to hear, but those who tell us what we need to hear.

He made this statement many years ago. It is interesting to consider whether it is more or less appropriate today. Are we more or less able to question the behaviour of our country's respective leaders without being labelled UnAmerican/UnAustralian."