This one needs no intro from me. They speak quite eloquently on their own…

September 2, 2008 – 18 min 8 sec

Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern on Palin and what McCain knew about false info that led to Iraq war

(Pt. 1)

The other day in The Obama-Biden Worldview, Phyllis Bennis, Eric Margolis and Paul Heinbecker talking with Paul Jay of The Real News began a discussion and dissection of the foreign policy mindset and worldview we can expect from an Obama-Biden Administration, then continued the analysis in The Obama-Biden Worldview (Pt. 2) on Sunday.

Today in Part 3 of the discussion they take up the question of whether or not Obama-Biden foreign policy will lead to a potentially catastrophic attack on Iran.

September 1, 2008 – 12 minutes

Obama Biden and Iran

The Obama-Biden Worldview with Eric Margolis, Phyllis Bennis and Paul Heinbecker. Pt.3

A bit of history…

August 29th 2006 marked the one year anniversary of the devastation in New Orleans caused by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This Special Greg Palast Report brings you exclusive footage, interviews and the stories of the hidden political agendas and the suppressed eyewitness reports.

In this half-hour film, Greg Palast and his team travel to New Orleans to investigate what has happened since Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast.

27 min 46 sec

Big Easy to Big Empty – The Untold Story Of The Drowning Of New Orleans

The other day in The Obama-Biden Worldview, Phyllis Bennis, Eric Margolis and Paul Heinbecker talking with Paul Jay of The Real News began a discussion and dissection of the foreign policy mindset and worldview we can expect from an Obama-Biden Administration.

Today in Part 2 of the series they go on to take a shot at the question of whether we will see some fundamental foreign policy movement away from the neocon goals of unipolar total US world military dominance and towards a more realistic and less dangerous “multipolar world” scenario, or whether an Obama-Biden administration will be a continuation of the past 60 odd years of creating the kind of resentment and blowback that causes things like 9/11.

August 31, 2008 – 11 min 43 sec

Will Obama-Biden question military dominance?

Phyllis Bennis is a Senior Analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC. She is the author of Before and After: US Foreign Policy and the September 11 Crisis and Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power.  Her newest book Understanding the US-Iran Crisis: A Primer  will be available in September 2008.

Eric Margolis is a journalist born in New York City and holding degrees from Georgetown the University of Geneva, and New York University. During the Vietnam War he served as a US Army infantryman. Margolis is the author of War at the Top of the World — The Struggle for Afghanistan and Asia is a syndicated columnist and broadcaster whose articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The International Herald Tribune, Mainichi Shimbun and US Naval Institute Proceedings.

Paul Heinbecker joined the Department of External Affairs (Canada) immediately after graduation, and received postings abroad in Ankara, Stockholm, and Paris. From 1989 to 1992, Heinbecker served as Chief Foreign Policy Advisor and speechwriter for Prime Minister of Canada Brian Mulroney, and as Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet for Foreign and Defence Policy. In 1992, he was appointed ambassador to Germany. In the late 1990s, he organized the task force on the Kosovo conflict, and served as head of the Canadian delegation to the Climate Change Convention in Kyoto. In 2000, Heinbecker was appointed as Ambassador to the United Nations. There he was a strong proponent of the International Criminal Court and argued for compromise in the lead-in to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

Let’s get serious for a moment.

There are better and more important things than politics. And if things don’t quite work out the way we’d like them to regardless of who wins the election in November, don’t forget that the road we want to travel is always out there…

It appears that reality has been turned on it’s head once more, and the history books have been written by the right wing propaganda machine and the media, and the story has been acceded to by the public and seems to have been accepted nearly completely by a coopted antiwar movement, all in favor of winning the presidency at any and all costs now.

The fact is that Georgia was put up to attacking South Ossetia by the neocons to force a long expected Russian hand to create a new cold war that down the road may go nuclear, and to try to give a campaign advantage to McCain as another “enemy” from which he will promise to “protect” you.

But not only is John McCain attempting to use the situation to swagger and show how “tough” and ready to stand up to “Russian aggression” he is, Barack Obama has obviously decided that a manufactured false reality is a useful political tool as well, even one that has the potential to kill many, and if he can be slicker at treating you as stupid as the republicans are treating the public… well, I suppose that’s just his “pragmatism” showing how fit to be president he is.

August 30, 2008 – 4 min 45 sec

Gareth Porter: The US is going to use a double standard to condemn Russia

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin accused the US of staging the Georgian conflict. His statements echo two articles pointing to Senator John McCain’s foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, in which conservative politician Pat Buchanan calls Sheunemann ” a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.” Gareth Porter also states that The US is going to use a double standard to condemn Russia.”

Gareth Porter is a historian and investigative journalist on US foreign and military policy analyst. He writes regularly for Inter Press Service on US policy towards Iraq and Iran. Author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.

Gareth Porter and Lawrence Korb, talking with Paul Jay shortly after Joe Biden’s speech at the DNC the other day, analyze Obama’s pick of Joe Biden as his running mate as positioning the Obama-Biden ticket to the right of John McCain.

August 29, 2008 – about 15 minutes

Panel discussion with Gareth Porter and Lawrence Korb

Gareth Porter is a historian and investigative journalist on US foreign and military policy analyst. He writes regularly for Inter Press Service on US policy towards Iraq and Iran. Author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.

Lawrence J. Korb is the Director of National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Senior Adviser to the Center for Defense Information. Korb served an advisor to the Reagan-Bush election committee in 1980 and was then appointed Assistant Secretary of Defense (Manpower, Reserve Affairs, Installations and Logistics) from 1981 to 1985. In that position, he administered about seventy percent of the Defense budget. For his service he was awarded the Department of Defense’s medal for Distinguished Public Service.

Obama tells supporters he still believes in an America where anything is possible, once we ditch that good-for-nothing Nate.

‘Yes We Can, Except Nate Walsh,’ Obama Says

COLUMBIA, SC – In a nationally televised speech Friday, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama altered his vision of a unified America to exclude Dayton, OH loser Nate Walsh.

According to Obama, the 32-year-old Walsh, who has lived with his parents intermittently since receiving his associate’s degree in 2001 and still does not have a credit card in his own name, no longer figures into the senator’s long-term plan of rallying Americans from all walks of life around a common, higher purpose.

“People of South Carolina, people of the world, this is our time, this is our moment,” Obama said before 72,000 supporters at the University of South Carolina’s Williams-Brice Stadium. “That is, unless you live in apartment 3L at 1254 Holden St., you watched Money Train on TBS last night at 3 a.m., and your name is Nate Walsh.”

“I have always said that the change we seek will not come easy, that it will not come without its share of sacrifice and struggle,” Obama continued. “And the last thing we need is dead weight like Nate Walsh adding another 20 or 30 years to the process.”

The speech, entitled “A More Perfect Union Minus Nate Walsh,” was 26 minutes long and contained the words “change” 12 times, “hope” 16 times, and “Nate,” in conjunction with the phrase “with the exception of,” 34 times.

Although Obama remained vague on issues such as health care and foreign policy, the Illinois senator was praised for finally publicly addressing the issue of Nate Walsh. Obama took a hard-line stance on Walsh, calling the part-time driving-range employee the lone aspect of America he doesn’t believe in, a citizen who can languish in the past for all he cares, and “on top of everything else, kind of a jerk.”

Paul Jay, CEO of The Real News, in a three way interview with Phyllis Bennis, Eric Margolis and Paul Heinbecker, discusses and dissects the foreign policy mindset and worldview we can expect from an Obama-Biden Administration…

August 28, 2008 – 12 min 45 sec

Phyllis Bennis is a Senior Analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC. She is the author of Before and After: US Foreign Policy and the September 11 Crisis and Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power.  Her newest book Understanding the US-Iran Crisis: A Primer  will be available in September 2008.

Eric Margolis is a journalist born in New York City and holding degrees from Georgetown the University of Geneva, and New York University. During the Vietnam War he served as a US Army infantryman. Margolis is the author of War at the Top of the World — The Struggle for Afghanistan and Asia is a syndicated columnist and broadcaster whose articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The International Herald Tribune, Mainichi Shimbun and US Naval Institute Proceedings.

Paul Heinbecker joined the Department of External Affairs (Canada) immediately after graduation, and received postings abroad in Ankara, Stockholm, and Paris. From 1989 to 1992, Heinbecker served as Chief Foreign Policy Advisor and speechwriter for Prime Minister of Canada Brian Mulroney, and as Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet for Foreign and Defence Policy. In 1992, he was appointed ambassador to Germany. In the late 1990s, he organized the task force on the Kosovo conflict, and served as head of the Canadian delegation to the Climate Change Convention in Kyoto. In 2000, Heinbecker was appointed as Ambassador to the United Nations. There he was a strong proponent of the International Criminal Court and argued for compromise in the lead-in to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

Are polls worth watching? Do they measure or do they make public opinion? Are the polls we read in the papers or on the net good indicators of whether it will be Obama or McCain who will win in November?

The one thing they never seem to attempt to measure is whether it will be everybody who wins or loses this fall…

August 27, 2008 – about 7 minutes

Barry Kay on the accuracy of polling and the presidential elections

Dr. Barry Kay teaches a seminar on voting behavior, as well as courses on U.S. Government and Public Policy in the Political Science Dept., at Wilfrid Laurier University. His research tends to be in the area of elections and public opinion. He is a past member of the Canadian National Election Study team, and recent publications pertain to electoral systems, public opinion polling, and the impact of single-issue interest groups. He has developed a model for projecting parliamentary seat distributions from popular vote or opinion polls, that is posted on the LISPOP page of the Laurier website. He is also a political analyst with Global Television, for their national election coverage.

August 27, 2008 – 6 min 47 sec

Stephen Zunes: Obama’s anti Iraq war stance wiped out by choosing hawk Biden

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org). From 1996 to 1999, he served as chair of the Board of Peaceworkers, a US-based group supporting the non-violent struggle of the Kosovar Albanians and other non-violent movements and peacemakers in areas of conflict.

Obama’s foreign policy positions have become indistinguishable from those of McCain. His campaign thus far has been virtually built around absorbing, co-opting and quieting the anti-war/anti-fascist/anti-imperialist movements.

How far do you go before winning becomes losing, and becomes just a shiny new paintjob hawked by a very good salesman?

August 26, 2008 9 min 38 sec

Naomi Klein speaks about Obama and the intellectual and political integrity of the progressive movement