I finally got around to buying the 1997 debut album from Alabama 3, Exile on Coldharbour Lane, and Beck’s 2005 release, Guero. Alabama 3 — now known in the US as A3, to avoid confusion of their twisted, indiosyncratic and unmistakable gospel-soaked beats with the insipid contemporary country band Alabama — is probably best [...]

The Bush administration are pushing hard to portray the War on Terra® as an existential struggle greater than World War II. This isn’t the first time WWII analogies have cropped up. When the insurgency in Iraq began to flourish, Condoleezza Rice compared their activities to those of the fabled — literally — Werwolf resistance in [...]

The hardest part of writing about the Bush administration’s record on national security is knowing where to begin. The second hardest part is knowing where to end; it’s simplest just to let physical exhaustion be one’s guide. Today, we’re going to begin with the draft.
Very few people think the Bush administration will institute a military [...]

According to ABC News, sourcing Pakistani officials, that country has offered Osama bin Laden safe haven if he promises to behave himself.
If he is in Pakistan, bin Laden “would not be taken into custody,” Major General Shaukat Sultan Khan told ABC News in a telephone interview, “as long as one is being like a [...]

As John Aravosis and others have noted, one voice is conspicuously missing from the controversy over ABC’s “The Path To 9/11.” 9/11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton has yet to speak publicly about the issue. The program will apparently air as scheduled, complete with key scenes that distort and in some instances completely fabricate the conclusions [...]

Is it possible al Qaeda is a bigger threat to us than we are to them? The increasingly hysterical rhetoric of the Bush administration would suggest so.
After three years of occupying Iraq, the US military enjoys less control over the country than at any time since the invasion. Yet Bush says that “[i]f we were [...]

Iran is the ascendent power in the Middle East. Iraqis are dying by their thousands. Afghanistan is disintegrating, again. Osama is still at large. North Korea trudges toward membership in the nuclear club.
Our foremost ally in the War on Terra®, Pakistan, appears not only to have given up on controlling the border between it [...]

Not every science fiction author is a clumsy stylist…nor is every storytelling conceit tacky

They can call it Good vs. Evil all they want to, but to me it just looks like two teams of right-wing religious loonies fighting with each other, and the rest of us are just cannon-fodder or part of the battleground.
– Avedon Carol
With a strong assist from Pope Benedict, president Bush has connected the [...]

The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad.
– George W. Bush
Do you remember how the US responded to Pearl Harbor by bombing Tokyo and then running off to invade Mexico? Do you remember how we struggled for three and a half years to gain control [...]

Slate’s Fred Kaplan narrowly avoided quoting Shakespeare in a story about George Bush’s phoned-in UN speech today. Kaplan said the speech “was full of stirring words, signifying nothing,” but that was an exaggeration in service to art: the words were stirring only in the sense that they stirred Kaplan to exasperated puzzlement, which was [...]

A recent Pew poll shows that 72% of Republicans believe the war in Iraq is going fairly well or very well. The surprise in the number isn’t that most Republicans remain solidly in favor of the invasion and occupation; it’s that their assessment is markedly more cheerful than the ones coming from the administration and [...]

Tony Snow laughed at me today in the White House briefing room after I asked him a question inspired by John Yoo’s vigorous defense, in an op-ed in last Sunday’s NY Times, of the Supreme Leader style of government that Mr. Yoo helped fashion when he worked in Bush’s Justice Department in the two years after the 9/11 attacks.

Should Democrats want to win the mid-term elections? Will the debate over torture and a scofflaw White House help Republicans?
According to the leading online opinion journal, maybe yes and maybe no, but definitely one or the other or another.
Slate’s Jacob Weisberg tackles the issue of whether or not Democrats should want to win control [...]

“It is my responsibility … to help the Iraqi people to turn Iraq into a stable, safe, peaceful and prosperous country. I take it seriously.”
Thus spake Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer on April 15 of 2003. He has since griped that he wasn’t given the tools necessary to fulfill his responsibility, specifically that the [...]

The New York Times reports today that an assessment produced jointly by all US intelligence agencies says US actions in Iraq exacerbated terrorism.
An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology. The report “says [...]

Senate majority leader Bill Frist has an intriguing take on pending Senate legislation that would legitimate certain torture techniques: he says that if he talks about specific provisions in the bill, terrorists “[will] come and try to assassinate us and people listening to us right now.”
Frist was responding to questions about the “compromise” legislation [...]

Iraq, with an impotent central government propped up by US troops and sectarian militias, is in practical terms a failed state. Afghanistan is in deep trouble. Pakistan’s dictator president is publishing a memoir aimed at burnishing his anti-US credentials. Hezbullah is sitting pretty in Lebanon. Gaza is in ruins. Iran is daily gaining clout in [...]

The Bush administration has released a declassified excerpt (Adobe Acrobat file) from a National Intelligence Estimate blaming Iraq for increased terrorism. Presumably, this is the upbeat portion of the report. One has to wonder what on earth the depressing part says.
Among the highlights are judgements that “the global jihadist movement—which includes al-Qa’ida, affiliated and independent [...]

Yesterday’s excerpt from the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq documented president Bush’s success at spreading terror. So how much has it cost us to make the country less safe at the same time as a gang of criminal deviants in Congress and the White House work to bury for once and all whatever claim to [...]

This week, it’s two non-genre-specific used bookstore finds. Given what you find in used bookstores, this is pretty well represented in my library. I’ll try to get more up to date one of these days, but these are both good ones if you missed ‘em.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird (A)
When I read Sirens of Titan [...]

A Democratic senator walks into a Republican bar. A Republican senator pulls a knife and demands the Democrat’s money. The Democrat hands over his wallet, grabs the knife and stabs himself repeatedly, screaming “Don’t hurt me!” as he falls to the floor. The Republican removes the cash, returns the wallet to the Democrat, kicks him [...]