After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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Lies the cia tells us
You know the scenario: Some president wants to drum up a war, or Pentagon contractors want to goose up military spending. Suddenly the media begins to report that "classified intelligence information" shows that Grenada needs to be invaded by the Marines, an aspirin factory in Sudan needs to be bombed, or a stupendous Star Wars missile-defense shield needs to be built. You get the feeling that these "intelligence reports" are classified because our officials make the damned things up!
Well, they do. Recently, the CIA admitted that for more than a decade during the Cold War, its dire warnings about the Soviet Union's military capabilities were all hype. The CIA now concedes that every major intelligence report on Soviet power from 1974 to 1986—covering the Ford, Carter, and Reagan presidencies— "substantially" overestimated the Kremlin's plans to expand its nuclear arsenal.
Whether you call it "overestimation" or "propaganda," the fact is that these false CIA reports were not benign documents that sat on a shelf gathering dust—they had a dramatic impact on U.S. policy and were used as the rationalization for huge increases in Pentagon spending, diverting federal dollars away from real domestic needs.