BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

In a world where Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is hands-down the champion of wackiness, two new contenders are challenging her for the title: Judson Phillips, president of the for-profit Tea Party Nation, and veteran conservative Dinesh D'Souza, author and president of The King's College in New York City, a subsidiary of Campus Crusade for Christ.

NIKOLAS KOZLOFF FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

For isolated and impoverished countries, it can sometimes prove difficult to pursue an independent foreign policy which challenges Washington's traditional sphere of influence. Take, for example, tiny Paraguay which has recently been convulsed in political instability. Four years ago, Fernando Lugo was elected president after pledging to take on political and economic elites on behalf of Paraguay's poor.

A former bishop, Lugo promised to tackle pressing social problems like land reform. His record, however, on proceeding with that agenda was considered inordinately supporters by his erstwhile supporters. But the threat of such reform was enough to spook the few families that owned most of the private land in Paraguay.

On the international front too, Lugo was making waves: though he continued to maintain friendly ties to the U.S., he also made overtures toward the populist regime of Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

Not surprisingly, such policies did not go over well either in Washington or with the ruling elite in Paraguary (who built up their near monopoly power over the economy and land under the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, who was the dictator of Paraguay for most of the half century - and, of course, a reliable US ally).

As I explained in another recent column, Lugo was recently impeached under very questionable circumstances, and indeed some have labeled the President's rushed removal a kind of soft coup. Following a skewed vote in the opposition-controlled Congress, Lugo was impeached for allegedly encouraging land seizures and Vice President Federico Franco assumed the presidency. Needless to say, however, the actual circumstances surrounding the land occupations are subject to much debate. According to authorities, peasant squatters opened fire on police as the security forces moved in to eject them. The peasants, however, claim that the police had in fact conducted a massacre.

There's no public evidence yet that the US had a direct hand in Lugo's removal, yet judging from secret correspondence recently released by whistle-blowing outfit WikiLeaks, Washington will be somewhat relieved to have rid itself of Paraguay's "liberation theology", the former bishop now president. Indeed, from the Bush administration to the Obama White House, the American political establishment viewed Lugo's reformist presidency with a degree of suspicion applied to any Latin American leader who pledges to take on the oligarchy. Though hardly what one would call a radical, Lugo nevertheless refused to ostracize Chávez and as a result the U.S. State Department spent a fair amount of time monitoring Paraguay's new leader.

Condi's Paranoid Mindset

STEFHANIE PENN SPEAR FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

In 2009 it seemed as though Congress was finally going to pass legislation that would transition our country to a renewable energy future. The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, also known as the Waxman-Markey Bill, would have created a cap and trade system on greenhouse gases, required electric utilities through a renewable electricity standard (RES) to meet 20 percent of their electricity demand through renewable energy sources and energy efficiency by 2020, subsidized renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies, and financed modernization of the electrical grid, among many other provisions.

BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

From his early days in the securities industry to his involvement with junk bonds, from serial bankruptcies to multiple violations of environmental standards, from polluting coal mines and steel mills to war profiteering, the Brooklyn, New York-born Ira Leon Rennert has apparently profited from a degenerative ethics disorder.

Now the billionaire whose lead smelters have caused irreparable harm to children; whose use of bankruptcy law evades environmental liabilities, whose RG Steel Sparrows Point mill will likely get away with not having to pay Baltimore the more than $5.4 million it owes the city for water and treated sewage, whose Humvee manufacturing company raked in millions of dollars from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, whose so-called support for Israel had him help fund restoration of an ancient tunnel system near Jerusalem's Wailing Wall, where the 1996 opening of a long-blocked route set off deadly riots, has incurred the wrath of a gaggle of millionaires in the Hamptons.

THOM HARTMANN AND GREG PALAST FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

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WILLIAM RIVERS PITT FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

For years and years and years, it seems like Democrats, liberals, progressives (or however one chooses to be defined), have been on the defensive, and for one reason: the message makers who have defined the GOP for decades, from Lee Atwater to Karl Rove, have been the absolute masters at political ju jitsu. Your strength becomes your weakness, and before you know it, you've been stabbed under the fifth rib and are bleeding to death before you realize you've had an accident.

WILLIAM RIVERS PITT FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Truth be told, a very, very small part of me has actually been feeling a swell of pity for GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney as these last weeks have unfolded.

This poor sad sack has been getting battered at every turn: the Supreme Court turned his whole show sideways with their rulings on the Arizona immigration law and Obama's health care legislation; when the mandate was upheld as constitutional, he staggered towards the argument that it isn't a tax before reeling back to the position that it is a tax after taking a terrible beating from his own people; his appearance before the NAACP was slightly less well-received than a bad case of the shingles; what was supposed to be his greatest strength as a candidate - his business experience - has become a rotting albatross around the neck of his campaign; and, until this afternoon, the worst part of this whole sordid mess came when conservative pundits like George Will stated in public that he should release his dreaded tax returns, lest he appear to be hiding something.

DEE EVANS FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Over the weekend, the Obama campaign put out a pretty clever campaign video of Mitt Romney singing "America the Beautiful" while displaying various news headlines of Romney/Bain outsourcing claims. I guess because the spot received such notice, the Romney campaign has once again followed the Obama campaign's lead and put out its own video of President Obama singing "Let's Stay Together".

Okay, about this "I'm rubber, you're glue" concept of the Romney campaign, one time would be a coincidence, twice may be a fluke but when every time the Obama campaign does something, the Romney campaign does something to mirror it...now, it's just bordering on lazy. Is it me, or does it seem that everything the Romney campaign says, does or utters is based on what the Obama campaign says, does or utters? Everywhere President Obama goes, Mitt Romney's campaign follows (circling and honking the bus horn by the way...ugh!). When everything you say, do or think is only based on what someone else says, does or thinks, I really think you're losing the battle. By the way, isn't Mitt Romney the one who just recently stated, "When you're responding, you're losing." Very astute synopsis; maybe his campaign staffers missed that memo.

WILL DURST FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

All of America should drop to its knees and thank the GOP for providing us with replacement fireworks. As you undoubtedly are aware, cities all over the country this year were forced to cancel Fourth of July festivities due to fear of fire, glitchy computers and twitchy bureaucrats. Like there's another kind.

The Republican House took great pains to salve our sensory deprived souls by trying to set off enough indoor fireworks to make the San Diego Big Bay Bust look like a fluttering votive candle. It was designed to be a spectacular explosion fueled by ego, obstinacy and behavior so self- absorbed, the casual bystander might assume we were in the middle of an election year.

BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

You wouldn't recognize him on the street and he definitely isn't a household name, but the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, the President of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference is more than ready for his close-up. With the country's demographics rapidly changing and immigration no longer on the back burner -- but not quite on the front one either -- Rodriguez is becoming more influential with both sides of the political aisle, has been in regular contact with Team Romney, and is drawing ever so much closer to a number of conservative Christian evangelical leaders.

In short, this is Reverend Rodriguez's time.