Just listened to the post. I found it quite important and timely.

The interviewee, Mr. Horton, is articulate and thorough in describing the overall situation not only from a domestic perspective but an international one as well. He's travelled worldwide in the pursuit of justice against torturers in sub-Saharan Africa but ended up studying torture by the US.

About halfway, Dick Cheney's pubic relations campaign to preemptively avoid prosecution is discussed. There is clearly more to his role than cheerleading aggressive interrogations-he spearheaded the White House's effort to torture, then helped cover up the lack of successful prosecutions and evidence.

Antiwar.com's Scott Horton grasps the fundamental injustice of torture in his interview. For a number of years now, research and interviews by him and others have built a mountain of evidence that our country was breaking the law. We need interviews like this to keep the powerful accountable, no matter what Obama might say, to push prosecutions forward.

Schiff's speech is accurate and robust. His main selling point appears to be the need for the market to correct.

Now I've been seeing a lot of intermingling between economics and the political. The link between the two appears more concerned about the size of the state and its fiscal responsibility than anything else. Of course libertarian and progressives and neo-cons are different, as are the impacts of their policies. Yet despite similarities in the neo-cons' approach and libertarians', there remains a massive void on the role of the state in the marketplace--neo-cons want free markets when it suits their security state aspirations, and defends the investor class at the expense of the proletariat. Despite their spending proclivity, progressives have been more restrained (although Clinton wasn't a prog.)

Schiff and his no-nonsense conclusions transcend politics, although I'm sure many will read him as a free marketeer. Ironically, it was the libertarian economists who predicted the current crisis, with Schiff at their front. The reasons for the collapse are really quite transparent. I don't know if we can blame them on political philosophies, being that the two parties appear to be one, the War Party. In this regard the libertarians do offer a political alternative with the potential for real change. (If indeed economic influences our condition and our politics, the forthcoming crisis will bring a well-deserved boost to the appeal of non-traditional parties, the libertarians only being one. Communists and the like will also receive a better audience.

Neither party seems capable of challenging the fiat money status quo, with the Fed in charge of our money. In this sense, economics do matter more than political positions, but the intercourse of human history has been a thoroughly political exercise, limited by the bounds of economic conditions, which libertarians care deeply about. [See my blog, jbpeebles.blogspot.com]

I'm sure this post would like to explore some key considerations in greater detail.

First, we do know that our counterinsurgency tactics cause massive collateral damage. The political consequences of getting fire on target outweigh military benefits, which seem marginal as the terrorists will likely respawn. This repeats the Vietnam paradigm not only in tactics, but strategy, and the likely inevitable consequence: defeat.

Yes, the superpower can keep its armies in the field, but what's the consequence? Ultimately, limitations are economic. The US can keep throwing men and materiel at its interventions, but the results will be politically unacceptable, and drain the economy. Military morale also crumbles as tours are overstretched without adequate relief.

As much as the US clings to the notion of exceptionalism, limits to military power mean the US will face its day of reckoning when it begins to understand the truth works no differently for us than for any previous empire.

Good to hear about Adam's run for Congress in New Mexico (see KokeshforCongress.com) I think the time has come to convert discontent with the status quo into real political opportunity. It's a safe bet that the War Party will run Washington as long as the duopoly maintains control.

As political representatives, those opposed to the war can represent a majority of Americans who want to end the wars. As activists, opponents to the war continue to be marginalized by the mass media. Little has changed since September 2007 when I went to D.C. and saw Adam play a leadership role in the March there, as well as in promoting it.

In Adam and people like him we can find a voice in the wilderness, the insanity of continuing to do as we always have, expecting different results.