Sarah Palin in the White House? Now that’s scary…

Washington Money Spent on Shaw Outpaces His Own Campaign

A shadowy group just outside of Washington, D.C., that goes by the misleading name of “The Center for Individual Freedom” has now pumped a total of $1,274,815 into the Alabama Supreme Court race on behalf of Republican Greg Shaw, outspending even the candidate’s own campaign, according to the campaign of Judge Deborah Bell Paseur, his Democratic opponent in the election coming up Tuesday, Nov. 4.

More than $250,000 was added just this week. Though the Shaw campaign started five weeks earlier, CFIF has spent almost two hundred thousand dollars more than Shaw.

The campaign of Paseur renewed its call on Judge Greg Shaw to keep his campaign’s commitment to transparency in funding, as a new link between the Shaw campaign and CFIF became clear. Terry Benham, a Shaw consultant and oil and gas lobbyist, worked along with CFIF on a campaign to promote the appointment of certain federal judges.

On Tuesday, FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization whose mission “aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics,” added the following to its Website:

“It’s also the case that a top consultant to Shaw, to whose firm he has paid more than $300,000 in this campaign, is Terry Benham. Since August, 2006, Benham has been affiliated with federal lobbying reports. It’s not clear how much the oil and gas interests might have paid additionally for state and local lobbying, which is Benham’s specialty. And Benham’s biography on the LinkedIn professional networking Web site says that he “has interests…in oil and gas exploration.”

“CFIF has not yet filed as a PAC with the Alabama Secretary of State’s office, a clear indication that they do not intend to disclose their finances by Thursday’s campaign deadline,” said Marion Steinfels, Paseur Campaign Manager. “We are simply asking the Shaw Campaign to keep their commitment to make public the names of those funding their campaign. The people of Alabama have a right to know why this out-of-state group has pumped over a million dollars into Judge Shaw’s campaign.”

The officers and former officers of CFIF have lobbied Congress on behalf of oil and tobacco interests. CFIF has routinely refused to reveal its funding sources, running afoul of election laws while attempting to affect the outcome of judicial races in other states. Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled against them, keeping their television advertisements off the air in West Virginia.

Greg Shaw claims his hands are clean of Big Oil money and influence — so why has he paid more than $1 million to a Washington DC oil lobbyist to run his campaign?

Campaign finance reports filed Thursday show Greg Shaw has paid another $955,000 over the last month to a company run by oil lobbyist Terry Benham. Total payments to Benham have now topped $1.2 million.

Even more, the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Factcheck.org this week disclosed that Benham’s Washington, D.C., company pocketed $820,000 in payments from the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, ChevronTexaco, Shell Exploration, and other Big Oil interests over the last two years alone. The non-partisan group also reported that Benham discloses on a Website that he holds business interests in “oil and gas exploration…”

Alabamians know Shaw’s dishonest campaign is being paid for by oil interests. But the latest public disclosure proves that from Day One, Big Oil runs his campaign, too.

“Why is Greg Shaw paying an oil lobbyist to run his campaign,” said Marion Steinfels, Paseur’s Campaign Manager. “It’s time for Shaw to come clean and tell Alabama voters why he hired a political shill for Big Oil to run his campaign for the Alabama Supreme Court.”

This week radio stations across the state refused to continue airing false ads paid for by secret donors to Shaw’s dishonest campaign for Alabama’s highest court. They’ve spent millions attacking Judge Deborah Bell Paseur, but Shaw’s secret donors refuse to tell voters who is paying for their vicious lies and attacks.

It’s time for Greg Shaw to come out of the gutter, and tell Alabama voters why he hired an oil company lobbyist to run his campaign for the Alabama Supreme Court.

Time Out
by Dan Rutledge

The main event on Week 9 of the SEC football season is the game once known as The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party. This year, the loser will have a heckova hangover.

Every November, the Georgia Bulldogs and the Florida Gators get together on neutral ground in Jacksonville, Fla. The game always has emotion and the result always plays a big part in deciding who represents the East Division in the SEC Championship Game in the Georgia Dome.

This year, with the two schools tied at the top of the East standings (Georgia 4-1 in SEC play, 6-1 overall and Florida 4-1 and 7-1 (Line: Florida by 6), the winner may as well make reservations for Atlanta since the next challenger, now at second place in the East standings, is Vanderbilt and as everyone knows, even after a fast 5-0 start, the Commodores are having a hard time getting that sixth win to be bowl eligible.

The Florida-Georgia game is an interesting matchup pitting two teams with outstanding quarterbacks against one another. The Gators’ Tim Tebow has something Bulldog QB Matt Stafford doesn’t have — a Heisman Trophy. But Stafford has something Tebow doesn’t — a win in the annual Cocktail Classic. Last year Stafford threw three TD passes in leading Georgia to a 42-30 win over Tebow’s Gators. That loss, and this game, means a little extra to Tebow, being from the Jacksonville area himself.

“It means a lot to me,” Tebow was quoted as saying this week, ”growing up as a kid in Jacksonville.”

In addition to the win, how each plays against each other could have something to say about who wins this year’s post-season awards. Both are semifinalists for the Davey O’Brien Award, given each year to the nation’s top QB. And the two junior signal callers are tied for the SEC lead with 12 TD passes each and are the only SEC quarterbacks ranked in the top 40 nationally in passer rating. The similarities continue in that both QBs have lost just five games as starters.

And the two quarterbacks aren’t the only players to watch Saturday in Jacksonville. It should be a real barn burner in that the Gators and Bulldogs may have more true game-breakers than any other two teams in the league — and all will be on the same field at the same time. Percy Harvin, Knowshon Moreno, Chris Rainey, A.J. Green, Jeff Demps, and Brandon James can all break a game open on a single play with their speed.

There are three other conference games on tap this week.

One of them, Tennessee (1-4, 3-5) at South Carolina (2-3, 5-3) (Line: S.C. by 6), would be a big game some seasons, but not this one with both teams out of the running for the East title. It is big for the Vols in that they need a league win to turn around a dismal season. South Carolina would like to become bowl-eligible this early in the year to help them land a good holiday destination.

The second league game is a so-so affair matching Kentucky (1-3, 5-3) from the East and Mississippi State (1-3, 3-5) from the West (Line: Mississippi St. by 3). The Cats started out strong, but have faltered since hitting the conference part of their schedule. Mississippi State started slow, but has shown improvement lately and would like a win to keep that momentum going.

The third SEC matchup is a Western battle that pits two teams, Ole Miss and Auburn (Line: Ole Miss by 6) with matching records (2-3 in league play, 4-4 overall) but different feelings about those marks. Auburn’s Tommy Tuberville is fighting for his future as angry fans mob the call-in shows to complain. Tuberville’s questionable decision to fire offensive coordinator Tony Franklin in midseason has put his team behind the eight-ball, as he himself admitted this week.

“I put the team in a bind in the middle of the season,” Tubs said. “We should be a lot better right now but we’re kind of in the third or fourth game of the season instead of the eighth game in terms of what we’re doing on offense and defense.”

Ole Miss fans, after suffering through three losing seasons under former coach Ed Orgeron, are highly satisfied with the Rebel’s 4-4 mark under Houston Nutt. Look for Ole Miss fans to remain happy, while AU fans get even angrier.

The non-conference games this week have Alabama (8-0) entertaining Arkansas State (4-3) for homecoming (Line: Alabama by 22 _). Kickoff is at 2 p.m. but the game is on pay-per-view only, so crank up the radio wherever you are.

Then there is Tulsa (8-8, ranked No. 19) at Arkansas (3-5) (Line: Tulsa. by 7) and Tulane (2-5) at LSU (5-2) (Line: LSU by 25).

An interesting sidenote: Nick Saban continues to remind older Tide fans of the good ol’ Bear Bryant days. Saban seems to channel Bear almost every week now.

As said before, he doesn’t mumble like the Bear, but the words or thoughts behind those words sure are similar. Bear always used to play up the upcoming opponent, finding some way to complement them and point out how dangerous they were – even if it was Vandy, Southern Miss, or Lousiana Tech coming up. Saban was hard at it this week, promoting Arkansas State QB Corey Leonard as “the best dual threat we’ve seen all season.”

Of course, remembering homecoming last year, Saban has every reason not to let his team get close to complacency or overconfidence — but it won’t happen this time around. The Tide will continue to roll. How much? Well, that’s hard to say. Saban, like Bear, doesn’t believe in “style points” achieved by running up the score on a lesser foe.

WEEKEND TV LINEUP

The Friday night game on the weekend television lineup (7 p.m. ESPN2) pits Wofford and Appalachian State. Saturday’s television lineup follows (all times CST):

11 a.m.
Miami at Virginia (CW), Wisconsin at Michigan St. (ESPN), Northwestern at Minnesota (ESPN2), Air Force at Army (ESPNU), Brown at Penn (Versus)

11:30 a.m.
Kansas St. at Kansas (FSNS), Auburn at Ole Miss (Raycom Sports)

1:30 p.m.
Pittsburgh at Notre Dame (NBC)

2 p.m.
Furman at Sanford (SportSouth), FSU at Georgia Tech (ABC)

2:30 p.m.
Georgia at Florida (CBS), Illinois at Iowa (ESPN), Clemson at Boston College (ESPNU)

5:30 p.m.
Washington at USC (FSNS)

6 p.m.
Louisville at Syracuse (ESPNU), Tennessee at South Carolina (ESPN2)

7 p.m.
Nebraska at Oklahoma (ESPN), Texas at Texas Tech (ABC), UAB at Southern Miss (CSS)

9:15 p.m.
Arizona St. at Oregon St. (FSNS)

Dan Rutledge is a veteran sports writer and editor who recently retired after 25 years with Gulf Coast Newspapers in Baldwin County, Alabama. He writes this advance column on college football exclusively for The Locust Fork News-Journal every Friday during football season.

The Black Warrior Riverkeeper and the Friends of the Locust Fork environmental groups have settled their lawsuit against Metro Recycling for polluting the Locust Fork River with pollution from a used tire landfill in Blount County, Alabama.

U.S. District Judge L. Scott Coogler approved the settlement requiring Metro Recycling to cease illegal discharges of pollutants, obtain a pollution permit mandated by the Clean Water Act, and pay $7,500 for a Supplemental Environmental Project in the Locust Fork watershed.

The money will fund aquatic surveys in the Locust Fork watershed which will be used to determine future conservation goals within the watershed, according to a joint press release issued by the groups this week.

The parties chose the Freshwater Land Trust, an Alabama non-profit land conservation organization, to receive Metro Recycling’s payment and enable the aquatic surveys.

Metro Recycling owns and operates a used-tire landfill, which was found during Riverkeeper patrols to be discharging pollutants into an unnamed tributary of Whites Creek, a tributary of the Locust Fork of the Black Warrior River. Laboratory results from Riverkeeper’s water samples showed the pollutants illegally discharged by Metro Recycling included: Benzene (a known carcinogen), Chloromethane (possible carcinogen), 1,2-Dichloroethane (probable carcinogen), Ethylbenzene, Toluene, Vinyl Chloride (known carcinogen), and Xylenes, o,m,p.

Metro Recycling violated the Clean Water Act and Alabama law by discharging pollutants without a proper permit, according to Nelson Brooke, Riverkeeper and Executive Director of the Black Warrior Riverkeeper.

“As Riverkeeper of this large watershed, help from committed locals who serve as my eyes, nose, and ears is crucial,” Brooke said in an e-mail interview. “We would not have known about this problem without concerned locals reporting it to us. Working in concert with locals we are an important voice for citizens when our state and federal agencies fail to adequately enforce environmental laws. Under our watch, polluters will be held accountable.”

The settlement money will help the environmental groups better understand the river’s aquatic biodiversity and act as better stewards in future conservation efforts.

“The Friends of the Locust Fork River is glad to be part of an opportunity to update the aquatic survey of the mid-70s through the Supplemental Environmental Settlement portion of the suit with Metro Tire Landfill,” according to Sam Howell, president of the group. “The study will indicate the current health of the Locust Fork River and give FLFR and Black Warrior Riverkeeper information on how to be better stewards of this river’s watershed. I am pleased The Freshwater Land Trust accepted the request to be the facilitator of the $7500.00 to begin the renewed aquatic study. I know the results will make the river and the communities surrounding it a better place to live.”

The Locust Fork of the Black Warrior River is a remarkable free-flowing river. Flowing for 159 miles out of Etowah, Marshall, and Blount counties into Jefferson County, the river is an outstanding resource for locals and visitors alike.

Click here for the settlement agreement.

Click here for the original lawsuit.

Black Warrior Riverkeeper is a non-profit organization whose mission is to protect and restore the Black Warrior River and its tributaries.

Friends of the Locust Fork is a non-profit grassroots organization dedicated to preserving the integrity of the Locust Fork River in its natural free-flowing state, and to that end, the lifestyle of the community which surrounds it.

Freshwater Land Trust is a non-profit organization whose mission is the acquisition and stewardship of lands that enhance water quality and preserve open space.

The Locust Fork News-Journal is an independent online news organization inspired in part by the Locust Fork River. To understand why, read these signature stories about it.

Secret Vistas: A River Runs Through It

The Future of Democracy and the Web Press

Guest Column
by Roger Shuler

Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman never dreamed that he actually would be convicted and sent to prison on corruption charges, according to an article in GQ magazine.

“I never thought for a minute that I was going to be convicted,” Siegelman tells reporter Brett Martin. “We knew where this prosecution was coming from. We knew the political motivation. I was confident that the truth would come out—so confident, in fact, that we didn’t put any witnesses on the stand because we didn’t think there was any evidence.”

Siegelman goes on to make some profound statements about the nature of evil and the harsh realities of prison:

Do I believe in evil? Do I believe that Karl Rove is evil? I do. I don’t mean that he was necessarily raised to be evil. But I think that, like Caligula, he turned himself into an evil ruler. He has subverted democracy and, by the way, done a great disservice to the Republican Party. I hear that more and more—like the former head of the Alabama Republican Party, whom I ran into at the airport in Washington lately. He told me, “I told them they should have stopped at [defeating you in] the election.” Yes, I think there are evil people in the world, and I think Karl Rove is one of them.

How stark is life in a federal prison? Listen to Siegelman:

I was taken to a maximum-security prison in Atlanta. No daylight. Food served through a little slot in the door. No exercise. I stayed there for three weeks, and then I was flown to a facility in New York, then Michigan, then Oklahoma City before ending up in Oakdale, Louisiana. During this time, my wife and family were not notified where I was.

Time is viewed totally differently in prison. When you’re free, you want the day to last as long as possible. You want to savor every moment. In prison, it’s just the opposite; you want to get rid of days as fast as you can. I couldn’t help but think about the people whose execution dates I had set when I was attorney general and that I’d upheld as governor. I said a quiet prayer that I had made the right decisions, because I knew then that the justice system was not infallible.

How important is it that Rove and others are held accountable for their corrupting influence on the U.S. justice system? It is essential, Siegelman says, that future Roves think twice before attempting to manipulate the justice system for political reasons:

If (Rove is) not held in contempt, it will send a clear signal that there are two systems of justice in this country: one for the rich and powerful, those connected to the White House, and one for the rest of us. When we get subpoenaed, we have to show up.

That’s the only way we’re ever going to reinstate people’s belief in our government, in our democracy: clearing the air about what happened at the Department of Justice. We’re not guessing that this stuff happened; we’re not speculating that it might have happened. We know it happened. And if Rove doesn’t pay, what are all those followers of his, the young people who want to be like him, going to think? If he’s held in contempt, it sends the message that their time might be next. It may not stop ‘em, but maybe it will slow them down.

What jumps out the most about this compelling interview? For me, it’s the comment Siegelman received from a Republican who said he told Rove and Co. they “should have stopped at [defeating you in] the election.”

What do we learn from this comment?

* This Republican, and probably others, cling to the notion that Bob Riley “defeated” Siegelman in the 2002 Alabama gubernatorial election. In reality, substantial evidence suggests that the ’02 election was stolen when vote totals in Baldwin County changed overnight.

How the 2002 Election Was Stolen in Bay Minette

The changing of the guards: Bay Minette, election night

Republicans are noted for playing fast and loose with the language, and this appears to be another example of it.

* It apparently is a poorly kept secret in Republican circles that Rove and Co. were out to get Siegelman. This GOPer flat-out tells Siegelman that he knew about the plot and counseled against it. How many other insiders knew about it, and when are they going to be called to testify before an authoritative body?

* Rove and Co. are prone to overreach, and I know about this firsthand. Siegelman’s airport companion says he told his Republican cohorts they should be content with having “won” the election–that pushing for a prosecution of Siegelman would be going too far and could lead to big trouble. Did they listen? Nope. Could they wind up in big trouble? We can all hope.

Similar behavior has taken place in my Legal Schnauzer case. And keep in mind, the “bad guys” in my story have direct ties to Rove. The corrupt attorney who filed a bogus lawsuit against me (William E. Swatek) has a son (Dax Swatek) who worked for Bill Canary. And Canary, of course, is a close associate of Rove.

Just as in the Siegelman case, we are talking about gold-plated Rovites here. And did they overreach? Well, they could have stopped at costing my wife and me thousands of dollars. They could have stopped at causing a bogus lawsuit to go to trial, when by law, it could not go to trial. They could have stopped at threatening to seize our cars and home.

But no, they had to cost me my job at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), where I had worked for 19 years.

What will be the cost of their overreaching? That remains to be seen. But if I have anything to do with it, it’s going to be high.

Roger Shuler publishes the Legal Schnauzer blog, where this guest column first appeared.

Guest Column
by Dwayne Hood

You should be very afraid.

If Barack Obama is elected president, he’s going to raise your taxes and increase the size of government. He’s going to take your money away and give it to people who won’t work. He’ll join Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to form an Axis of Evil that will force our nation into socialism.

He wants to “spread the wealth” by realigning our tax system away from President Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. Obama will tax small businesses and stifle individual opportunity and initiative. This will create massive job losses reminiscent of our Great Depression.

If Obama’s elected, we’ll also “wave the white flag of surrender” in Iraq. If he redeploys our troops away from a 1,000 year-old feud between Sunni and Shia factions, it means we’ll lose our War on Terror. And once we’ve lost in Iraq, terrorists will bring their attacks back to our shores.

You should be frightened because Obama’s the most liberal member of our Senate. He supported sex education for kindergarten children! If he’s elected, your beautifully pure five-year-olds will be force-fed intimate details of sexual relations. And sex education in schools could lead to discussion of birth control and homosexuality! That could lead to abortions and gay marriage!

It’s been rumored that Obama’s a Muslim. His middle name is Hussein and he was educated in an Indonesian school with Muslim children. He’s also known and befriended Muslims who’ve worn head scarves and attended mosques. And once you associate with Muslims, terrorists cannot be far behind.

Obama knows a man who was in a terrorist group 40 years ago and attended a church with a preacher who cursed America. That means Obama’s “palling around with terrorists” and has anti-American views. He’s not a real Christian or a real American. You should be very afraid.

So to be safe, vote for John McCain and Republicans because of their stand for financial deregulation that led to our economic meltdown. Let them resolve our energy crisis by building 45 nuclear plants in the next 20 years. And if anything happens to McCain, at least we have Sarah Palin to confront all domestic and foreign threats. If anything should make one feel secure, it’s “Hockey Mom” and her “First Dude” leading the free world.

Every four years, Republicans bang their drum of fear to frighten Americans into voting for neo-conservative ideology that led to two wars, economic destruction, and a broken government. The results are so good that our president hasn’t appeared at a campaign event in this presidential election. So to combat Republican fears we should vote for people who perpetuate this fear. It’s an endless downward spiral of terror and coercion. They want us to believe we have everything to fear, including fear itself.

Have you heard a children’s story about the little boy who cried “wolf”? This election proves the GOP has railed against a bogeyman once too often. Yes, our nation faces incredible danger and challenges. But in charting a course for our future, Republicans must do more than yell “Joe the Plumber” and “Drill Baby Drill.”

Americans are realizing a birthright to choice and free elections. We get the government we deserve. And we’re fixing to vote in better leadership than we’ve had.

That should make the anti-reality conservative Christian Republicans very afraid indeed.

Imagine a government that works? Oh, the horror of it…

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

In a world of hurt and bad news as the global economy implodes, there is some good news to report this Sunday morning as the late October air finally begins to cool off the brick walls of The Bunker.

The best news is that the presidential election of 2008 is almost over. One more week of negative TV ads and lying robo-calls and then we can all breathe a sigh of relief and get on with trying to turn this country in a better direction after eight years of black Bush anti-rule.

That is if the Democrats win and we don’t have to spend another four years fighting the idiotic conservative policies of the angry John McCain and his right-wing nut running mate Sarah Palin.

The other good news is that with one week and two days to go, the aggregated polling at Pollster.com shows the Democratic Party ticket winning in a landslide on Nov. 4. Let’s just hope the lead holds up for a few more days so that Karl Rove’s hackers cannot steal another election.

While the not-so-liberal New York Times issued it’s reasoned endorsement of the ticket of Barack Obama for president this week, our wildly conservative Republican hometown newspaper just had to extend its losing streak with this hilariously misleading endorsement of McCain.

We are still waiting on the apology from that editorial staff for their two-time endorsement of the dufus president-prince George W. Bush. It’s a wonder the racist “pro-life” newspaper sells any papers at all in a city full of liberals and African-American voters. I guess it’s safe to say they sell more newspapers in the white-flight suburbs than the city itself. The financial calculation had to be that an endorsement of Obama would have finished off the paper that has lost a significant portion of its staff of late to early retirement packages.

If only they knew how to produce a Website readers could use, they might have a chance of surviving in this new online world. There are a number of us out here who will never forgive them for their role in killing the one Scripps paper in Alabama, The Birmingham Post-Herald, which might have been able to provide the kind of Web journalism this state needs. Other Scripps papers around the country are doing some amazing work, including the Rocky Mountain News in Colorado and the Knoxville News-Sentinel in east Tennessee.

But that’s OK, because we have a long-term plan to continue providing a viable alternative to the people of this state who want a FREE free online news source without all the bureaucratic baggage of a conservative chain newspaper where corporate profits rule the editorial roost.

Since we already endorsed the Democratic Party’s pick in this race, there’s no reason to re-endorse the Obama-Biden ticket. Our recommendation is for voters to check the Big D and vote a straight Democratic Party ticket on the Nov. 4 ballot, not so much as an endorsement of “the man,” but to throw the Republican bums out who have screwed up just about everything they can in this country for the past eight years.

It is really hard to understand how anyone can vote for another Republican with the economy in the worst shape since the Great Depression, along with the debacle of the Iraq war, the failures associated with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and the complete loss of trust of the United States by people the world over.

We are concerned with some of Barack Obama’s suggested moderate policies, such as his hedge to the private sector on national health insurance. And we were not happy with his vote this summer for Bush’s spying bill that gutted the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

But we believe he is an educated man with an even-keel personality who can negotiate our way back into the hearts and minds of people around the world. And that should be our number one priority right now. We are going to need the good will of the world to right the wrongs and reverse the bad policies of the Bush-Cheney years.

Our first priority has to be an energy plan that begins to reduce our dependence on oil from the Middle East, a policy that also begins to address the top problem facing the world right now: climate change due to global warming. Even the Bush CIA and Senator John McCain realize that’s the world’s top problem, although that news gets buried in an election year when, in American elections, no one wants to be labeled a “liberal environmentalist.”

Once this election is over next Tuesday, that will be our focus. We will be working to influence the new administration in dealing with our energy and environmental problems, as well as figuring out how to provide health care to every American citizen. While the conservatives will continue to scream about “big government,” it’s going to take a pretty big government in the U.S. to tackle these problems.

And the fact is, it’s going to take a pretty big government, as well, to provide the leadership and incentive structure to fix the shattered economy. Our vision is that the only real future we have is a green future. We can grow our way out of this mess with green technology. That is our only real hope.

This week on Bill Moyers’ JOURNAL, he interviewed economist James K. Galbraith from the University of Texas. Author of the new book The Predator State, he gave the best summary I’ve seen yet on the causes of the economic crisis and how the U.S. might best move forward. The main point is we have the institutions — created in the 1930s to get out of the Great Depression — to get out of this mess. But we must understand those lessons and use those institutions.

The cult of the free market has dominated economic policy-talk since the Reagan revolution of nearly thirty years ago, according to the Amazon.com book review. Tax cuts and small government, monetarism, balanced budgets, deregulation, and free trade are the core elements of this dogma, a dogma so successful that even many liberals accept it. But a funny thing happened on the bridge to the twenty-first century. While liberals continue to bow before the free-market altar, conservatives in the style of George W. Bush have abandoned it altogether. That is why principled conservatives — the Reagan true believers — long ago abandoned Bush.

Enter James K. Galbraith, the iconoclastic economist. In this riveting book, Galbraith first dissects the stale remains of Reaganism and shows how Bush and company had no choice except to dump them into the trash. He then explores the true nature of the Bush regime: a “corporate republic,” bringing the methods and mentality of big business to public life; a coalition of lobbies, doing the bidding of clients in the oil, mining, military, pharmaceutical, agribusiness, insurance, and media industries; and a predator state, intent not on reducing government but rather on diverting public cash into private hands.

In plain English, the Republican Party has been hijacked by political leaders who long since stopped caring if reality conformed to their message.

Galbraith follows with an impertinent question: if conservatives no longer take free markets seriously, why should liberals?

Why keep liberal thought in the straitjacket of pay-as-you-go, of assigning inflation control to the Federal Reserve, of attempting to “make markets work”? Why not build a new economic policy based on what is really happening in this country?

The real economy is not a free-market economy. It is a complex combination of private and public institutions, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, higher education, the housing finance system, and a vast federal research establishment. The real problems and challenges — inequality, climate change, the infrastructure deficit, the subprime crisis, and the future of the dollar — are problems that cannot be solved by incantations about the market. They will be solved only with planning – with standards and other policies that transcend and even transform markets.

A timely, provocative work whose message will endure beyond this election season, The Predator State will appeal to the broad audience of thoughtful Americans who wish to understand the forces at work in our economy and culture and who seek to live in a nation that is both prosperous and progressive.

“James Galbraith elegantly and effectively counters the economic fundamentalism that has captured public discourse in recent years, and offers a cogent guide to the real political economy. Myth-busting, far-ranging, and eye-opening,” says Robert B. Reich, Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, says the book, “shows how to break the spell that conservatives have cast over the minds of liberals (and everyone else) for many years.”

“With a combination of erudition, insight, and wit worthy of John Kenneth Galbraith, Thorstein Veblen, and John Maynard Keynes, James K. Galbraith offers a critique of the conventional unwisdom about the economy that is as compelling as it is provocative,” says Michael Lind, Whitehead Senior Fellow at The New America Foundation and author of The American Way of Strategy.

Bruce Bartlett, author of Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, says, “James Galbraith has written an extremely challenging book. Although its principal target is conservative economics, it is no less critical of conventional liberalism. Galbraith correctly recognizes that today both approaches are intellectually bankrupt and incapable of addressing the nation’s pressing economic problems. I hope The Predator State stimulates needed debate among both liberals and conservatives on the mistakes both sides have made that have gotten us to where we are now.”

This looks like a must read to me!