Thom Hartmann

I was about 12 and into the first year of a very brief career as a magician, in partnership with my best friend Chuck and his stepfather, the late professional stage magician Jim Edwards.

Thomas Paine said it best.“It has been thought,” he wrote in The Rights of Man in 1791, “…that government is a compact between those who govern and those who are governed; but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with.

It's Willie Horton all over again. The Bush family is subjecting Americans to psychological operations, only the level of sophistication and deception is an order of magnitude higher than it was in 1988. And it could turn the election, if not used effectively in rebuttal. Here's how it works, and how Dick Cheney just used it masterfully:

As your wise Native American elders here have shared, you know your roots. You know the languages of your great-grandmothers, from before the White Europeans arrived and murdered your people and stole their lands. You know the customs of your people that go back a thousand years, five thousand years, some of you to the time of the original settlement of this area, just as the glaciers receded, nine thousand years ago, and perhaps even tens of thousands of years before that. The ways of your people have been passed down all that time.

Notes from my 2 August 1998 meeting with Pope John Paul II.The invitation for a personal meeting with His Holiness Pope John Paul II scrolled off our fax machine, complete with instructions for protocol for meeting the Pontiff, and we at first thought it was a prank.