You don’t try very hard to please me; with what you know it should be easy … this could be the last time, this could be the last time, may be the last time, I don’t know …
If I had an audience large enough, I’d make “The Last Time”, a pre-punk Rolling Stones anthem of [...]

True to his prosecutorial roots, Vincent Bugliosi gave a concise summation on Thursday of his case against George W. Bush. Bush, says Bugliosi in his new book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, is responsible for the death of each US soldier killed in Iraq because he lied to Congress and the nation [...]

I’m monitoring Barack Obama not by listening to anything he or Joe Biden says, but by tracking the sputtering heads bobbing in his wake. I’m no longer reading blogs that appear to be taking either man or the Democratic party seriously, so when I run across something like Digby’s lament of Joe Biden’s elegiac portrait [...]

A People’s History of American Empire, by Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki, and Paul Buhle
The Quiet American, by Graham Greene
My reading theme this month has been the American imperial project, which seems appropriate enough this season as I consider a vote for whether or not I want my foreign bombing done to the heady harmonies of [...]

Despite my constant exhortation to readers, it’s very likely, to the point of a lock, that voters will not choose to bring on the revolution by electing John McCain and precipitating the simultaneous onsets of facism and the worst depression since the best one. Almost as certain is that among president Obama’s first orders of [...]

Continuing from where we left off, which was with the explanation that however poorly you may think of politicians, you are, unless burdened with a constant and absolutely crushing sense of impending doom, nowhere near the awful truth. The reason politicians get away with what they do is that recognizing what they do is the [...]

The New York Times business desk reporters and editors work hard to be objective and calm in their coverage of events. That’s why they’ve been consistently behind the curve lately, and why readers who mistake what amounts to Charge of the Light Brigade bravado as cutting edge financial journalism are similarly dragging ass behind events.
To [...]

We wrote recently about the regrettable tendency of New York Times finance writers to predict events inversely; when they say something bad might not happen, it inevitably does; when they say something bad might happen within a few weeks, it seems to happen within a few days.
Much of today’s Times business section is given [...]

Astute readers may have noticed during the past seven-plus years that the government has spent way more money than it has appropriated. That’s not intrinsically a bad thing, but it’s pretty bad when it’s done mostly so that people with a lot of money can have a lot more, and to finance wars, investments that [...]

First, our anti-spam device has just passed the 500,000 served milestone, meaning that it has caught more than 500,000 spam messages from scum and robots purporting to be legitimate commenters. And second, some lowlife scum stole my computer from the Santa Monica library yesterday during the two minutes I had my back turned.
When I [...]

Due to the theft of my computer I wasn’t able to comment in more or less real time on the much larger if less meaningful to me theft of $700 billion $1 trillion from the US Treasury. Yes, it was an inside job. In fact, everyone is on the inside except me and, maybe, you. [...]

The only fair way to score the debates is to watch them without audio. That way one doesn’t get distracted by what the candidates say, which anyway has only a minor relationship with reality. The important thing is how they looked. Did McCain smirk? Did Obama get that pinched, schoolmarm-ish look? Did either man dip [...]

I’ve written a lot about the alleged financial crisis afflicting the country, by which is meant Wall Street and investors, but I don’t really care about it beyond the very considerable entertainment value. Some real pain attaches to it, but by the time we hear about that the revolution will be here and the authors [...]