Month: March 2007

I‘m not sure whether it’s an encouraging sign or not, but recent weeks clearly show that a criticism I among many others have made of President Bush – that he is so stubborn he can never change policies no matter what the facts on the ground might indicate as prudent – is simply not the … Continue reading “Bush the Flip-Flopper”

The United States has given Israel $51.3 billion in military grants since 1949, most of it after 1974 – more than any other country in the post-1945 era. Israel has also received $11.2 billion in loans for military equipment, plus $31 billion in economic grants, not to mention loan guarantees or joint military projects. But … Continue reading “Israel’s Last Chance”

The first confession released by the Bush regime’s Military Tribunals – that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – has discredited the entire process. Writing in Jurist, Northwestern University law professor Anthony D’Amato likens Mohammed’s confession to those that emerged in Stalin’s show trials of Bolshevik leaders in the 1930s. That was my own immediate thought. I … Continue reading “The Confession Backfired”

A little more than half of the U.S. population lives in 75 metropolitan areas. Russia has 4,399 nuclear warheads deployed. Except for 624 to be carried by bombers, they are all land-based and submarine missiles. Furthermore, this past week Russia test-fired a land-based missile, the RSM54, and a submarine-launched missile. Both were intercontinental. Both hit … Continue reading “Forget Israel, Befriend Russia”

Hours after the jury convicted Lewis “Scooter” Libby of obstructing justice – preventing Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald from finding out whether a crime had been committed in the outing by columnist Bob Novak of CIA operative Valerie Plame – Joseph C. Wilson IV told reporters that the CIA was holding up publication of Valerie Wilson’s … Continue reading “Novak’s ‘Outings’: Damage Control”

Updated at 12:51 a.m. EST, Mar. 17, 2007At least 62 Iraqis were reported killed or found dead today and another 126 were wounded. Also, the U.S. military reported that two more American servicemembers were killed in separate incidents yesterday. An American soldier was killed when a bomb blasted his patrol in the Salah ad Din … Continue reading “Friday: 2 GIs, 62 Iraqis Killed; 126 Iraqis Wounded”

The Bush administration’s greatest success is its ability to escape accountability for its numerous impeachable offenses. The administration’s offenses against US law, the US Constitution, civil liberties, human rights, and the Geneva Conventions, its lies to Congress and the American people, its vote-rigging scandals, its sweetheart no-bid contracts to favored firms, its political firing of … Continue reading “The Last Days of Constitutional Rule?”

Sen. Barack Obama isn’t quite sure how he feels about the lopsided situation between Israel and Palestine. Less than two weeks after Obama gloated to AIPAC about his love for Israel, he unexpectedly admitted the truth while campaigning in Iowa recently. "[N]obody is suffering more than the Palestinian people…" said Obama, "the Israeli government must … Continue reading “The Problem with Barack Obama’s Israel Pose”

Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, contains just about everything you might find in such a book: portraits of movement luminaries, such as Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek, as well as walk-ons by various proto-libertarians of the Benjamin Tucker–Liberty school … Continue reading “Libertarianism
and the Great Divide”

BAGHDAD – Many Iraqis are now looking to local political leadership to fill wide gaps in a fractured government that is failing to provide security and basic needs. "Iraqis feel lost amongst too many political currents that blew their country away with their narrow sectarian and personal interests," Mohammad Jaafar, a Baghdad-based politician formerly involved … Continue reading “Iraqis Search for Political Leadership”