Anne Kornblut described heavyweight pollster and PR honcho Mark Penn as Hillary Clinton’s de facto campaign manager in a front-page story in yesterday’s Washington Post. If a presidential candidate is known by the company she keeps, then the relationship between Penn, whose PR firm shills for some of the world’s largest corporations and includes a [...]

“Please, ponder over this and feed me back as I am in dire need of your assistance at this time.”
I get a lot of emails asking me to assist someone in moving tens of millions in stolen or lost funds out of one despotic hell hole or another. Usually the writer is the son of [...]

There Are Doors by Gene Wolfe: A+
Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock: B+
Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay: B-
Ægypt by John Crowley: A
The aim of every storyteller, even those who purport to write non-fiction, is to transport the reader to another world. There’s a lot to be said about putting them together believably, and even the [...]

In a delightful bit of performance art, someone has leaked a new Army Operational Security (OPSEC) regulation to Wired magazine. Adding to the irony of the move is that reporters, of whom Wired’s Noah Shachtman is one, are listed as security threats alongside drug cartels and al Qaeda.
This is the document behind the flap about [...]

Among the great occasional pleasures I enjoyed while living in Hawaii for more than a decade were evenings spent lounging around on the lanai of Steve Geimer, the general manager of Arturo’s, and chowing down on his invariably tasty pupus and dinners. The Arturo of the company is Arturo Montoya, who arrived in Hawaii during [...]

A front-page story in today’s Washington Post says that US soldiers are “at odds with ethics standards.” The story cites a Pentagon survey showing that “one-third of U.S. soldiers in Iraq … believe torture should be allowed if it helps gather important information about insurgents,” while 40% “said they approve of such illegal abuse if [...]

Four years into the occupation of Iraq, national security advisor Stephen Hadley says the administration finally has a plan and all they need now is someone to execute it: an Iraq war czar.
Hadley’s insistence that the administration finally knows what they’re doing is in part a response to retired Marine general John Sheehan, who three [...]

I know it’s a bit early to call the GOP presidential primaries, especially in favor of someone who hasn’t officially announced, but Chuck Hagel’s the guy.
Here’s why: Hagel is the only candidate with both impeccable social reactionary credentials and a credible basis for supporting a withdrawal from Iraq by the time the actual presidential [...]

If you’re in need of proof that proponents of The Surge, the president’s latest plan for accomplishing more dead people in Iraq, are deeply ill at ease with reality, consult Martin Sieff, UPI’s senior political analyst. On April 30, Sieff wrote a story in which he uses an extraordinarily creative statistical analysis to demonstrate that [...]

Bush tells Saudis: I’ll never leave Iraq!

Two British men suffer for Bush’s sins…

It’s the most brilliant political stratagem since Pat Buchanan kidnapped and murdered the Reform party in 2000: “Gridlock in a Can.”
Unity ‘08 wants to run a bipartisan ticket in the next presidential election, mix-and-matching candidates from the two major parties with candidates from the other party or with independents. Among the names bandied about [...]

The Washington Post reported Sunday on a Pentagon official in Iraq who has drawn the ire of other government officials by unilaterally reconstituting some of that country’s state-owned industries.
Paul Brinkley, a deputy undersecretary of defense, has been called a Stalinist by U.S. diplomats in Iraq. One has accused him of helping insurgents build better [...]

Among the less subtle hints about US long-term plans for Iraq are the massive, permanent military bases there and the Brobdignagian new US embassy in the Green Zone. No one, including congressional Democrats, ever talks about the bases, but Al Kamen has some details about the embassy in today’s Washington Post.
For all those who keep [...]

Arizona senator John McCain disappointed the audience at Tuesday’s GOP presidential candidates debate when he refused to support the use of torture against terrorism suspects, but he may have repaired some of the damage when he promised to personally take the fight to terrorists in Iraq.
McCain became the first of the GOP presidential hopefuls to [...]

It’s perfect: the man nominated by George Bush to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission received a $150,000 payoff from the organization representing the businesses he would be in charge of regulating.
But Michael Baroody is probably telling the truth when he says that the money won’t have any impact on the way he does [...]

The website of Alhurra, the Virginia-based Arabic language satellite broadcaster, acknowledges that the channel is funded by the U.S. government but says that the channel’s parent company, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Inc., “receives this funding from the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), an independent and autonomous federal agency. The BBG serves as a firewall [...]

Let no one say that the Bush administration’s Middle East policy, such as it is, has been an unqualified failure. Sure, Iran and Osama bin Laden may be the primary beneficiaries of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Yes, the unqualified US support for Israel’s disastrous assault on Lebanon helped precipitate yet another political [...]

More than 100 Washington Post readers have responded to a Washington Post op-ed piece by new U.S. intelligence director Mike McConnell calling for changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. At last count, only five comments could be interpreted as favorable, and only one of those was genuinely coherent. A number of readers point out [...]

The newest new US plan for Iraq involves political negotiations, selectively assassinating uncooperative Iraqi government and security officials and strengthening the Iraqi army, which is described in the Washington Post story on the plan as “one of the more reliable institutions in the country.”
This would be the same army that U.S officials said only a [...]