Thanks Eric. I  keep thinking I  might be able to do the tactical voting thing for B.O. and then I hear something I hadn\'t hear before from his mouth that turns my stomach yet again.

Like this one. Here\'s Barack Obama talking bullshit to GM workers in Janesville, WI on February 13th: "It\'s time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money putting America back together."

God knows we need to put America back together but does the supposed peacenick Obama really expect us to believe that (a) we are "putting Iraq back together" with a deadly imperial occupation that has killed more than  a million of that nation\'s people and that (b) nobody out here knows that it\'s the U.S. that has blown Iraq apart  --- "killed" it, according to Nir Rosen (see below) ---- through two deadly military assaults, one ongoing invasion and continuing assault and a decade plus of deadly, mass-murderous "economic sanctions.  Here\'s some human and reality-based observation from Tom Engelhardt:

"Whether civilian dead between the invasion of 2003 and mid-2006 (before the  worst year of civil-war level violence even hit) was in the range of 600,000 as a study in the British medical journal, The Lancet reported, or 150,000 as a recent World Health Organization study suggests, whether two million or 2.5 million Iraqis have fled the country, whether 1.1 million or more than two million have been displaced internally, whether electricity blackouts and water shortages have marginally increased or decreased, whether the country\'s health-care system is beyond resuscitation or could still be revived, whether Iraqi oil production has nearly crept back to the low point of the Saddam Hussein-era or not, whether fields of opium poppies are, for the first time, spreading across the country\'s agricultural lands or still relatively localized, Iraq is a continuing disaster zone on a catastrophic scale hard to match in recent memory."

This is from Indymedia Milwaukee.Thank you to SDS at UWM for pasting in a photo of Hillary as well as Obama.  That\'s very important. The Barack Obama Phenomenon (BOP) may have been my leading focus for reasons I\'ve clearly explained but my ultimate subject here is yes the broader corporate-imperial elections system and the broader narrow-spectrum political culture (look at the articles listed in the article linked [two lines] above) as a whole.The BOP is the product and in many ways a perfect storm epitome of all that.