On Monday at the White House press briefing, Press Secretary Dana Perino declined to answer when I asked her whether the White House would apologize for last Friday’s raid by U.S. forces in Iraq that reportedly killed a relative of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
The slain man, Ali Abdul Hussein al-Maliki, was described as the [...]

Blaming our country’s woes exclusively on the people who have most directly wrought them—Bush, Cheney, torture maven David Addington et al—becomes increasingly difficult in the face of the refusal by Democratic party leaders to confer accountability, let alone make any attempt to visit some sort of necessarily inadequate justice, upon the administration.
The party’s presidential [...]

I voted for Barack Obama in the California primary because I thought that he represented the best chance, albeit a slim one, of electing from the two remaining candidates a president who might experience a Saul-and-donkey moment from which he would wake with a powerful social conscience. Instead, he appears set to preside over the [...]

Updated 2/2/2010 to remove copyrighted material (a letter to the editor) per request of the Santa Monica Daily Press and to expand upon my original response to the letter.
The Santa Monica Daily Press is a local freebie paper which does original reporting leavened with some local columnists, the occasional AP story and an active letters [...]

I do my writing and online reading at the Santa Monica library now. It’s comfortable and quiet, but there’s no place like home; without one, I find myself easily distracted, a much less prolific writer and a less omnivorous reader. Accordingly, I’ve trimmed my blogroll by about a hundred to include only the ones I [...]

Among the trophy and sporting photos in the December/January issue of Outdoor Life is one showing a pair of US Border Patrol agents rappelling down a boulder-strewn slope. The photo is part of a recruiting ad for the Department of Homeland Security’s US Customs and Border Protection arm, and it was spotted by one of [...]

By “nick,” we mean something along the lines of the Grand Canyon or Marianas Trench. It is a nick into which millions of erstwhile homeowners, along with millions more investors—but no policy makers, so far—have tumbled with barely a trace, unless you count the recession they’re leaving in their wake.
As BTC News more or less [...]

The Sacramento Bee asks the headlined question and answers, unsurprisingly, “Yes.” Other news outlets have reported the increasing use of criminal history waivers by the Army and the Army National Guard as recruiting became one of the casualties of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, but the Bee is the first to connect the [...]

John McCain said in a Thursday interview with the Kansas City Star that Barack Obama is politically to the left of Vermont’s socialist senator, Bernie Sanders. Presumably McCain was referring to the National Journal rankings, which named Obama the most liberal senator based upon his sporadic votes—he missed 35% of them—in 2007.
Even the National [...]

A new poll in the New York Times shows that Barack Obama has inexplicably failed to erase the legacies of slavery in the United States, and further, that he has consistently failed to turn concentrated sulphuric acid into a decent cabernet. Analysts are stunned by this new evidence that Obama is at best a demigod [...]

The frothing radical right thinks the New York Times is the frothing radical left, as if such a thing exists in this country in this day, but this is a newspaper that doesn’t speak truth to power even when the power is itself, even after the lights are out, even in the sound-proofed panic room [...]

Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut
The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth
This month’s selection is a pair of books that plot out future American dystopias as envisioned in 1952. I think it’s an interesting time, in that even in heyday of the American capitalist mythology, a few authors were still frustrated enough [...]

One of the most unfair aspects of George W. Bush’s foreign policy disasters, not counting the literally millions of people who have been killed, maimed or driven from their homes in direct consequence — we’re not counting them because, let’s face it, for Americans they don’t count — is that he won’t suffer any repercussions [...]

The worst national security administration ever has a hideous record of ministering to combat troops returning home with psychiatric issues. The military have been slow to recognize and treat post-traumatic stress disorder, and have returned soldiers to combat without treatment. The suicide rate for soldiers who are serving or have served in Afghanistan and Iraq [...]

“The main reason we are losing in Afghanistan is not because there are too few American soldiers, but because there are not enough Afghans ready to fight and die for the kind of government we want.”
Let’s coin some alternatives. “The main reason al-Qaeda is losing in America is not because there are too few terrorists, [...]