Ya, after the confirmation hearings for Shearer where Jesse Helms and other yahoos really gave him the # (and don't forget how they torpedoed Morton Halperin for his IPS connections and editing a critical book on the CIA, and Johnetta Cole for her work in the Venceremos Brigade) I looked up in the Congressional Quarterly or the National Journal or one of those other rags like Roll Call, the transcripts and was disheartened to see Shearer say that he now believed in "democratic capitalism" (Though that contradiction in terms beloved of neo-con theologian Michael Novak, wasn't a way to get on Jesse's good side I'd say. He's Old Right/paleo-con. "Democratic capitalism" smacks of that neo-con globalist interventionism of the crowd at the National Endowment for Democracy, a den of neo-connery.) And Shearer's wife was the left mayor of the People's Republic of Santa Monica, Ruth Yanatta Goldway, elected with other members of Tom Hayden's Campaign for Economic Democracy, back in the 80's. Father in law was David Goldway, the recently deceased, longtime editor of Science & Society, the longstanding Marxist journal. BTW, Shearer now is Ambassador to Finland. And Halperin has some undersecretary of something post at the State Dept.
Michael Pugliese