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 […]

My own Obama speech moment: as I was walking home late on the night of the speech, I ran across four black teenagers, probably 15 or 16 years old. They started to cross the street as I approached. As we passed in opposite directions I heard one of them say, “You see that Charlie Manson-looking […]

BTC News contributor Eric Brewer, now reporting from the White House for online magazine Raw story, challenged Bush press secretary Dana Perino on the president’s claim that al Qaeda in Iraq might one day appropriate Iraq’s oil and use the funds for their own purposes.
This isn’t a new claim—Bush has made it before, as […]

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 […]

A few days ago, New York University journalism professor and press critic Jay Rosen flagged an essay on the perils of journalistic neutrality by Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus. The essay was published in Frank: Academics for the Real World, a product of the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service. Frank […]

That’s a mind-boggling but logical implication of an amazing anecdote in a Washington Post commentary today written by John Rogers, a captain in the U.S. Army who served in Iraq from June 2006 to September 2007.
Rogers’s piece is an explanation of why he plans to leave the army. One of his reasons is that his […]

George W. Bush has a death grip on the title of Worst US President Ever, but he’s not alone in achieving historic levels of incompetence: his cabinet secretaries are pulling their weight as well.
Take Condoleezza Rice, for instance. As Bush’s national security council chief, she presided over the administration’s total lack of interest in counter-terrorism […]