Republican senator Lindsay Graham, last heard from on the subject of relaxing one’s expectations for Iraq, slipped the leash and found his way to a television studio again. He took the opportunity to allow as how he hopes that vacationing Iraqi legislators “will get an earful” from their constituents about the disappointing political situation in [...]

BTC News proudly endorsed Tom Tancredo for President back in July of 2005 on the strength of his foreign policy chops — it was then that he first proposed making the possible destruction of Muslim holy cities an official plank of U.S. foreign policy. We’re pleased to see that he has not only refused to [...]

Barack Obama invoked 911, directly slammed the Bush administration, indirectly slammed Hillary Clinton and delivered some distilled blood to his vampire constituency in what was billed as a major foreign policy address but turned out to be a more or less boilerplate, Council on Foreign Relations-style speech today.
The part of the speech drawing the [...]

The Washington Post is reporting today that top anti-terrorism official knew that U.S.-based Chiquita International paid protection money to a right-wing Colombian paramilitary group implicated in hundreds of murders and listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization but did nothing about it. The Post says that in 2003, when Homeland Security chief Michael [...]

Michael McGough, senior editorial writer of the Los Angeles Times, wrote a whopper on July 26. It was about politics and the U.S. Supreme Court, and his reasoning – to use the word with wild abandon – rested on the philosophy of none other than Sen. Lindsay Graham. Yes, the same cheerleader for Bush’s War [...]

Right-wing talk show host and hardened War on Terra® veteran Hugh Hewitt came away from a Wednesday sit-down with president Bush convinced that the president can regain public confidence on Iraq by sharing his grasp of the situation and commitment to victory with Americans just as he shared it with Hewitt and nine other right-wing [...]

ssssssssssssssssssss
That’s one giant hiss, and most of all to the women, and most most of all to the one who is one of my Senators … and not for the first time, sellout Diane Feinstein (aka DiFi) … who was inexcusably enabling Bush already back in 2001 …. and 2002 … but still in 2007?!?! [...]

He’s a notorious world conqueror, barely able to conceal his lust for empire behind a facade of altruistic spreading of Kagan-style democracy throughout the benighted world. And he seems to see America as his alter ego, created to do his bidding. America is Superman, destined to save the world from itself and mold it into…into…what? [...]

Okay, LA Times. Just what kind of service are you providing your readership anymore? Isn’t tracking California’s two Senators’ votes, like, a no-brainer as one of your daily monitorings?
Isn’t having one of your home-state Democratic Senators join the GOP and become the decisive vote sending a controversial nominee — Mississippi’s Leslie Southwick, controversial [...]

When the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon has lost more than 100,000 Ak-47s in Iraq, along with a number of other combat items, the number rang a bell. A little more than two years ago, at the same time as we were tossing guns into the void, then defense-secretary Donald Rumsfeld was fretting publicly [...]

The bankruptcy bill passed by Congress and signed by president Bush in 2005 makes seeking protection from creditors tougher for people who aren’t corporations. Apparently it also makes seeking protection from people easier for corporations (via Eschaton).
Bear Stearns Cos.’ decision to liquidate two bankrupt hedge funds in the Cayman Islands instead of New York may [...]

If you had to paraphrase the Washington Post op-ed from Democratic Leadership Council chairman Harold Ford, Jr., today, it would go something like this: “Democrats, George W. Bush has screwed up so badly that all you need to do to win is show up. Dear God, please don’t rock the boat.” George W. Bush has [...]

Earth: An Intimate History, by Richard Fortey
Punctuated Equilibrium, by Stephen Jay Gould
Here are two long discursions on natural history, reviewed for the local koraxophiles. They are more “books for buds”: I’d originally planned to read three or four non-fiction monsters in a row, but these took me a long enough as it was. [...]

What could possibly go wrong with a scheme to introduce tens of thousands of young, stressed out soldiers fighting a guerrilla war in a Muslim country to a particularly bloody-minded brand of aggressively evangelical apocalyptic Christianity? As Max Blumenthal reports in The Nation, the Pentagon is on a quest — one might say a crusade [...]

It’s not just Iraqis, or even Muslims. Christian militarism has been getting along just fine for centuries now, even turning on each other when there was no non-Christian enemy to bring to Jesus at the point of a sword. When it comes to war, Christian militarists – I also like the term Christian fascists, and [...]

Conservatives are already giving up the good fight. They’re going to have to do what liberals have been doing for decades now: vote for the least of the evils. A column in today’s Los Angeles Times lays it all out:
Sen. Clinton is rapidly becoming not merely acceptable to many right-wingers but possibly even their candidate [...]

Quiz: How many people have been killed and wounded in Iraq since Hillary Clinton said that an immediate full-scale withdrawal would be a “big mistake”?
Answer: She said that on Nov. 22, 2005. Not really that long ago, but since then 1,600 American soldiers have been killed and 11,000 wounded, and about 32,000 Iraqi civilians and [...]

I’m not quite sure what all to make of it [though i'm about to make a lot of it anyway], and maybe I’m the only one only now belatedly seeing this, but I just google-stumbled [googlumbled?] on a nationwide survey on childrearing practices taken in August 2005, where 600 adults (18 and over, half male, [...]

U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice appears to have reverted to her Cold War roots with her announcement last month, in tandem with fellow cold warrior and US defense secretary Robert Gates, that the US intends to sell some $20 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab [...]

Hardly a day goes by when we don’t hear that Iran is supplying sophisticated IEDs — improvised explosive devices — to Iraqi insurgents. No one doubts that the Iranian government is perfectly willing to do whatever they think will advance their interests, including arming and otherwise supporting their allies in Iraq, but the story [...]

Here’s a December 13, 2001, CNN headline: “Fierce Fighting Resumes in Tora Bora, Advances Made Quickly Against al Qaeda”. Here’s an August 16, 2007, Reuters headline: “Afghan and U.S. forces assault al Qaeda in Tora Bora”.
What’s wrong with this picture?

Friday’s Wall Street Journal [sorry, can't link] reported on 34 foreclosures in New Orleans, foreclosures by subprime lending companies which, it turns out, were invested in by the hedge fund (Fortress), which in turn John Edwards has been invested in — and which has hired him as advisor — all fully disclosed, never hidden, but [...]

A recent article in slate by Columbia economics professor Ray Fisman, drawing on a forthcoming paper in American Economic Review ["Diamonds Are Forever, Wars Are Not. Is Conflict Bad for Private Firms?"] by fellow economists Massimo Guidolin and Eliana La Ferrara, takes the answer to their question [i.e., no, not necessarily, and sometimes it is [...]

Can “Democrats,” “resolve” and “Iraq” be used in the same sentence without violating the Associated Press style manual guidelines? I traded my copy to a literate streetcorner pharmacist for a few days of anti-depression medication, so I don’t know. I do know that congressional Democrats will not be taking any action to hasten our exit [...]

The war – George Bush’s War, the Neo-con’s War, Joe Lieberman’s War, the Republican-Democrat’s War – is as catastrophic as its opponents predicted, but the reality of it is far more catastrophic than they could have imagined, because it’s impossible to imagine such endless, grinding horror. It must be lived to be known. Words can [...]

The American Psychological Association now says that its members can’t take part in water-boarding, sleep deprivation or sexual humiliation, among other techniques that have become part and parcel of Bush tactics against alleged terrorists at Guantanamo. If they see such activities, they are now required to intervene to stop them, report them to superiors, and [...]

The Washington Post’s lead editorial today asserts that Tehran is supplying “sophisticated bombs” that are killing American soldiers in Iraq.
After President Bush made the same accusation last year, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace said, on March 14, 2006, that he had no proof that the Iranian government was responsible for such attacks.
This year, on [...]

aka “You take our breath away.”
Reprehensibly: That’s beyond revoltingly rich, and with a twist: it’s richesse at the expense of everybody and everything else, self-indulgent, spoonfed government dole-out wealth on an IRS silver platter. These are the same folks already getting exponentially greater boon to their ledgers from everything the government [...]

It’s yet another example of reporting that makes no effort at analysis of Bush’s claims. This time, Bush says that an American withdrawal from Iraq would have an effect like that of our withdrawal from Vietnam – a bloodbath resulting in the deaths of millions of people.
…one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price [...]

The foreign policy community has been subjected to considerable rigorous scrutiny by various, generally liberal commentators of late. The proximate cause of the exercise was the New York Times op-ed column from born-and-raised community residents Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon, Iraq invasion supporters who recast themselves as occupation critics in order to create an artificial [...]