Israel is creating a nightmare in Gaza, systematically wrecking the infrastructure that keeps people alive there, and few here seem to notice.

An unbelievable number of bloggers on what is charitably known as the political right are throwing fits about this Times story on the homes, the village and the impact on local residents of hosting the two Bush administration honchos. So far as they’re concerned, the Times is taking revenge on the Bush administration for the heat directed at the newspaper over its publication of a story detailing measures the Bushies are taking to monitor financial transactions worldwide.

Connecticut Senator Joe Liberman, whose political soul contains multitudes, today became the nation’s first Meta-Democrat. Lieberman announced at a press conference that he was beginning a petition drive to place himself on the November ballot as an independent should he lose his Democratic primary bid against challenger Ned Lamont.

Predominantly liberal voting rights activists have been raising alarms about electronic voting machines for several years now. Come November, when many activists expect to see massive irregularities in precincts with electronic voting systems, they may find themselves in some suprising company.

One man I respect says that he’d no longer support another one. It’s no fun when your friends start fighting, is it?
PZ Myers of Pharyngula, like many good liberals, reacted quite strongly to Barack Obama’s recent speech suggesting that liberals take into account the role of faith in American life. Now I certainly have my [...]

A Pentagon investigator says recruiting woes have effectively destroyed a zero-tolerance policy against neo-Nazis in the US military.

President Bush says he has the authority to order people kidnapped, tortured and held forever without charges. Is anything off limits?

Michigan Republican Peter Hoekstra wrote a strong letter in May accusing the White House of concealing intelligence activities from Congress. Hoekstra, who chairs the House intelligence committee and, with Pennsylvania Republican senator Rick Santorum, has accused intelligence czar John Negroponte of downplaying the import of rusty chemical munitions found in Iraq, says that any concealed programs might amount to “a violation of the law.”

An op-ed column in the San Frnacisco Chronicle suggests some close parallels between the respective failures of Enron and George Bush. The fraud that led to Enron’s collapse, according to Alex Epstein, was the outcome of a determined effort to elevate ideology above reality and then to conceal the predictable results of that effort.

Last Wednesday, Marco Mancini, the head of counterintelligence at SISMI, the Italian military intelligence agency, was arrested for allegedly abetting the CIA’s 2003 kidnap and rendition to Egypt of Muslim cleric Hassan Nasr.

Comparing illegal immigrants to cattle, Congressman Peter King has proposed erecting an electrified fence along the US-Mexico border. King, a Republican from Iowa, made the remarks on the House floor Tuesday. He also brought along a model of his proposed fence, but refrained perhaps due to logistical challenges, from actually electrocuting an illegal immigrant stand-in.

Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has told US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice to back off with respect to Israel’s attack on Lebanon. That’s according to Steve Clemons, who writes on foreign policy and has what he describes as reliable sources within the state department.

It should come as little surprise that this administration’s first veto is used to stymie science. The administration has had a bone to pick with any science that brushes up against its own notions of morality and sense of manifest destiny from climate change to evolution to biology in the classroom.

A lot of people think George W. Bush is stupid. It’s an understandable mistake: he often acts as though he is. But the truth is worse.