Bernard Weiner writes: "It isn't just being thrown back into those tumultuous times that's stimulating my emotions these days. It's the feeling that, in many ways, our country is still IN those times. Many of the issues are the same -- an immoral war, the gross lies that got us deep into the big muddy, a corrupt administration, the unhealthy power of the military-industrial complex, the crimes and then the coverup, the repressive police agencies, the growing anti-war sentiment, etc. -- and even some of the players are the same, on both sides.... The operative lesson of history seems to be that nobody learns the lessons of history... It's up to the citizens and their representatives -- and, I would add, to the independent journalists on the internet and elsewhere -- to ensure that our democratic institutions continue to function."

"Coming forward three decades after Watergate, a former top aide to President Nixon now contends that Nixon ordered the break-in that would lead to his resignation. Jeb Stuart Magruder previously had gone no further than saying that John Mitchell, the former attorney general who was running the Nixon re-election campaign in 1972, approved the plan to break into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office building near the White House and bug the telephone of the party chairman, Larry O'Brien. The break-in occurred....on June 17, 1972. Magruder, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and perjury charges stemming from the break-in and spent seven months in prison, explained his three decades of silence on Nixon's culpability by telling the AP on Friday: 'Nobody ever asked me a question about that'... Magruder made the assertion on a PBS documentary, 'Watergate Plus 30: Shadow of History'... The way Magruder tells the story, Nixon knew everything from the beginning."

Timothy Noah writes for Slate: "Chatterbox is looking at a January 1981 clipping from the Washington Post headlined, 'Nixon Ex-Aide Named Counsel to Reagan.' The ex-aide in question was Fred Fielding, whom William Gaines and his journalism class at the University of Illinois have identified as Deep Throat, Bob Woodward's famous Watergate source. Deep Throat's identity is known only to Woodward; his co-author, Carl Bernstein; their editor, Ben Bradlee; and Throat. (Serious Deep Throat scholars always call Deep Throat 'Throat.') Bradlee once famously claimed that you could discover Deep Throat's identity by feeding all known information about him into a computer. Taking that as a challenge, Gaines more or less did so. The computer named Fielding."

William Neikirk writes for the Chicago Tribune: "Attempting to solve one of America's greatest political mysteries, student investigators at the University of Illinois have concluded that former White House lawyer Fred Fielding is Deep Throat, the secret source who broke the Watergate scandal wide open. Some of the students and their teacher, William Gaines, named Fielding as their choice for Deep Throat in a news conference at the Watergate Hotel, site of the famed break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee nearly 31 years ago... Using 16,000 pages of FBI documents and other Watergate records, Gaines and his students said that Fielding knew about or likely would have known about many of the key Watergate revelations that Woodward and Bernstein made in their news stories that won them a Pulitzer Prize."

Bernard Weiner writes: "The key to carrying on that insane, immoral war [in Vietnam] was that the decisions always were made in secret by the President, away from scrutiny by the Congress, the press, and certainly by the American people....And who is in charge of the current government's secrets today? The HardRightists who control American policy and who have made the Bush Administration the most secretive, closed shop -- isolated from the real world in which most of us live -- of any administration in modern times...The lock on secrets must be broken once again, before we become permanently engaged in an imperial foreign policy that will bring death and destruction down upon the world and that will leave our own society morally adrift and, as in the Vietnam era, close to a political civil-war. Let us learn from history and stop our leaders before it's too late. We must all become Ellsbergs."

"President Nixon ordered a worldwide secret nuclear alert in October 1969, calling his wartime tactic a 'madman strategy' aimed at scaring the Soviets into forcing concessions from North Vietnam, declassified documents show. It didn't work, as Moscow displayed no concern. The reason is unclear. The Soviets may not have cared, may not have been as influential as Nixon believed - or, like the rest of the world, might not have noticed the alert. The aim of the alert was kept secret from even the generals who put it into place. Among declassified documents published this week by the independent National Security Archive is a memo to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger from his assistant, Gen. Alexander Haig. It described plans to signal 'U.S. intent to escalate military operations in Vietnam in the face of continued enemy intransigence in Paris.' Among the 'signals' in Haig's March 2 outline: bombing enemy positions in Cambodia." On March 17, Nixon secretly bombed Cambodia.

StickingItToTheMan.com writes, "By the spring of 1974, Tricky Dick (President Richard Nixon) was in a great deal of trouble. Not only had the House Judiciary Committee turned up the heat on its investigation into Watergate, but Nixon was also facing serious questions about his tax history. In 1973, word leaked out that Nixon had been paying taxes commensurate with an annual income of $15,000; as president, he had in fact earned $200,000 a year. Duly suspicious, Congress marshaled a probe into Nixon's fiscal affairs. The president conceded that a few of his deductions might in fact be cause for controversy, and handed over his tax statements to the House committee in December of 1973. After intensive review and deliberation, the committee ruled that Nixon owed the IRS $476,431. And, on April 3, 1974, Nixon agreed to pay $432,787.13 in back taxes for the past three years." And in September 1973, VP Spiro Agnew resigned after pleading no contest to a charge of income tax evasion.

David Cogswell writes, "There was something deeply flawed about letting Nixon hand-pick his successor... And it wasn't only -- as John Dean had called it -- a cancer on the presidency. It was a cancer on the whole rotten system. By not removing it, the corrupt structure stayed intact and provided the infrastructure for the crimes of the Reagan-Bush regime, which conducted its own secret war in Nicaragua, Nixon style. Those crimes are now being covered up by the Bush II regime, which has elevated many of the criminals of the Iran Contra affair and restored them to positions of power at the top of the U.S. hierarchy... At one point during the impeachment struggles, Nixon tried to threaten the FBI by telling it if it didn't back off 'all that Bay of Pigs stuff' would come out. Nixon's aides and advisors said that when Nixon talked about the Kennedy assassination, he talked in code calling it 'all that Bay of Pigs stuff.' So go figure."

"Lots of people have theories on the identity of 'Deep Throat,' the famous Watergate whisperer who helped spell the end of the Nixon presidency. Now, former Nixon White House Counsel and key Watergate player John Dean will take his stab at cracking Washington's mystery of the century, releasing 'The Deep Throat Brief' as an e-book through online magazine publisher Salon in June...Dean -- whose 1973 Senate testimony helped force Nixon's 1974 resignation -- will release his 40,000-word manuscript on June 17, the 30th anniversary of the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee's Watergate headquarters. Dean told the San Francisco Chronicle he spent some 20 years going through archives and tapes to develop his theory on 'Deep Throat'." Alexander Haig, Diane Sawyer and Leonard Garment are all suspected of being Deep Throat. Or could he be James Schlesinger or Richard Ober, with whom Woodward worked when he was a naval intelligence officer?

As if recently released conversations between Tricky Dick and Billy Graham weren't moronic and anti-Semitic enough, newly reviewed tapes show Nixon wasn't just convinced that "Jews controlled the media." No, the conspiracy, in his mind, had far greater implications - "marijuana, psychiatry, homosexuality and Meathead of All in the Family" were also enemies of the state. In one gem of an exchange Nixon states, "You know, it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing Marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists." (Nixon does not explain how these "pot smoking, Jewish psychiatrists" found the time to control the media.) On the "Meathead" character, in "All in the family," Nixon frets, "The-son-in-law apparently goes both ways," then concludes, that another character in the show, "Is obviously queer. He wears an ascot, and so forth."

Poor Tricky Dick! Even after his death, the conspiracies that tormented his life continue. "In a simmering controversy over the stewardship of the Richard M. Nixon Library & Birthplace, advocates for the former president's feuding daughters sought to frame the dispute Friday in sharply different terms--and to lay some of the bad blood to backroom politicking within the Nixon Foundation itself." Nixon buffs will find many of the old cast of characters fighting it out for the Nixon legacy - a battle triggered once again by Bebe Rebozo's millions. Besides Julie and Tricia, there's speechwriter Ken Khachigian, aerosol king Robert Abplanalp, and Soviet-hater Dimitri Simes - and in the shadows lurk Henry Kissinger, Walter Annenberg and George Shultz. Nixon's most famous quote may be "I am not a crook," but his worst prediction was certainly "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore!" The world will be kicking Nixon around forever...

It comes as no surprise that Billy Graham, who supposedly led Shrub to "salvation", is now revealed by Nixon tapes to be an anti-Semite. As Counterpunch.org describes, "The minister used his influence to slander an entire people, to betray the trust of those who had by his own account been good to him, to urge the most powerful person in the world to act vigorously in the service of bigotry. Closer in time to Dachau than to the present moment, the 'preacher to the presidents' counseled the rankest, crudest, most heart-sickening anti-Semitism." Given the fact that Graham has been a "spiritual adviser" to the Bush family for years, we should have expected as much – Dubya's granddaddy Prescott Bush financed Adolf Hitler during World War II; Poppy Bush was busted for harboring several neo-Nazis and anti-Semites in his first presidential campaign; and Shrub himself has denied Jews the keys to the gates of heaven! Graham and the Bushes are like peas in the pod.

"A few weeks before ordering an escalation of the Vietnam War, President Nixon matter-of-factly raised the idea of using a nuclear bomb. The notion was quickly shot down by national security adviser Henry Kissinger. Nixon's abrupt suggestion, buried in 500 hours of tapes released Thursday at the National Archives, came after Kissinger laid out a variety of options for stepping up the war effort, such as attacking power plants and docks, in an April 25, 1972, conversation in the Executive Office Building. "I'd rather use the nuclear bomb," Nixon responded. 'That, I think, would just be too much,' Kissinger replied. 'The nuclear bomb. Does that bother you?' Nixon asked. 'I just want you to think big'…Nixon showed less regard for the North Vietnamese in his 1972 taped conversations. In a conversation from June, he told domestic adviser Charles Colson, 'We want to decimate that goddamned place.' He added: 'North Vietnam is going to get reordered. ... It's about time, it's what should have been done long ago.'"

Journalists are poring over Nixon's just-released tapes, and finding some hot stuff. First, a previously unknown dirty trick: "In May of 1972, Arthur Bremer attempted to assassinate White House hopeful George Wallace. The tapes reveal that Nixon wanted to pin the blame on supporters of Democrats George McGovern and Edward Kennedy, whom he might face in the November elections. 'Just say he (the shooter) was a supporter of McGovern and Kennedy,' he [told aides]. 'Now, just put that out!' Nixon said, his voice rising for emphasis. 'Just say you have it on unmistakable evidence.'" Next, a stunning mystery: "In the same conversation, Nixon gave new fodder for conspiracy theorists who question whether Lee Harvey Oswald was the only shooter involved in the assassination of President John Kennedy. Referring to the report by the Warren Commission, 'it was the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated,' Nixon said. He did not elaborate why he questioned the report." So reports the BBC.

In his authoritative new book, Richard Reeves "describes Nixon as a hater who 'thought most everybody else was like him': 'His view of the world was a bad mirror image of himself, of his own darkness. He did not like people because, more often than not, he distorted their motivations to match his own.' Clearly this suspicious outlook contributed to Nixon's acute discomfort with people - he memorized most of his public remarks and needed talking points for even the most casual of encounters - and to his well-known hatred of the press, student dissidents and anyone who posed a threat to his authority." So writes Michiko Kakutani in the NY Times.

"The government is giving audio experts a chance to solve an old mystery of Watergate: What was in that 18 1/2-minute gap on a Nixon tape recorded three days after the break-in... The gap is part of a recording made June 20, 1972, in the old Executive Office Building as Nixon chatted with his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. News of the erasure, late the following year, eroded Nixon's credibility at a time when his presidency was unraveling over the June 17, 1972, break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate. Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, testified that she was transcribing the tape when a phone rang. She said she must have pushed the wrong button and left her foot on a pedal, accidentally recording over part of the original conversation." We can't wait for the results!

Kissinger, remember him. The guy who supported Pinochet, the one who precipitated the Khmer Rouge take-over of Cambodia, the one who whispered pep talks about the Vietnam War into Nixon's ear? Well, he's back. One could say that Henry is trying to defend the "honor" of his former boss. But there wasn't much of that to begin with. Was there, Henry?

Before you think Democrats.com is quoting from the National Enquirer, you should know that this story comes from the New York Times. Yes, the NYT is carrying an article that contains several bombshells from a new biography of America's psychologically troubled President.