By now you may know that top Bush administration officials, with the knowledge and approval of the president, choreographed torture regimens for terrorism suspects held by the US. You probably haven’t heard much about the reaction from Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
That’s because they haven’t reacted. Like most of the press, Clinton […]

The news that senior Bush administration officials not only approved the use of torture but actually micromanaged the application of it should be the last straw for dithering Democrats in the House of Representatives.
We have known for years that the president and the vice president approved war crimes, including torture, on the basis of […]

ABC News is reporting that senior Bush administration officials were intimately involved in planning torture regimens for use against terrorism suspects. The officials include vice president Dick Cheney; CIA director George Tenet and his successor, former CIA agent and Congressman Porter Goss; then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice; former secretary of state Colin Powell; former secretary […]

To say that US troops killed in Iraq are dying for their country is to do them a profound disservice. The invasion and occupation of Iraq were and remain bad for this country by every measure: moral, financial, diplomatic, military. What the troops are dying for is an epic blunder foisted upon them and us […]

Andrew Sorkin at the New York Times offers a short tick-tock on the weekend demise of Bear Stearns, the Wall Street powerhouse that just sold, pending shareholder approval, for six cents on the dollar of its Friday stock price—less than the value of the Manhattan skyscraper bearing the firm’s name.
The story is full of good […]

Documents unsealed in a British court allege that Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia’s long time US ambassador and a close family friend of president George W. Bush, threatened to withhold terrorism intelligence from the UK if former prime minister Tony Blair failed to subvert a bribery inquiry into payments to the prince from mammoth British defense […]

Colin Powell dropped some hints yesterday in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he’s looking outside the GOP for a candidate to endorse.
Powell, who served as the closer for the Bush administration’s sale of an Iraq invasion with an astonishingly dishonest speech to the United Nations, the world and, most importantly, credulous Washington pundits, […]

Continuing on my quest to close enough browser tabs for my computer to regain some self-respect and nimbleness, here’s the second installment of stuff I either meant to write but never quite did, or did write but for some reason couldn’t bring myself to part with the web page I used for material. See here […]

When onlookers asked Ben Franklin what sort of government the constitutional convention had produced, he told them “A republic, if you can keep it.” Well, we haven’t. We no longer live in a constitutional republic. The republic is dead, deceased, demised, passed on, no more, ceased to be, expired, late, bereft of life; it is […]

Many months ago when I was writing something about health care I ran across a blog that had a number of entries on the subject, one of which I used in my piece. That web page and 70-some others are still open in my browser, which in retaliation is now consuming most of my computer’s […]