Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has learned his lesson, and it is this: it’s better to be bold. He’s exchanged the mealy-mouthed equivocations of his ill-fated presidential run – when he actually met with Bill Kristol, presumably to negotiate getting a break from his...
Kurdish President Vows Independence Vote Will Happen; 52 Killed in Iraq
The Superpower That Fought Itself – and Lost
Originally posted at TomDispatch. After 19 al-Qaeda militants armed only with box-cutters and knives hijacked four American commercial airliners, the U.S. military moved with remarkable efficiency to rectify the problem. In the years since, in its global war on...
Shi’ite Militiamen Coerce City Council; 107 Killed in Iraq
Tribalism Marches On!
Recently, a columnist-friend, Matt Kenney, sent me a 25-year-old newspaper with his chiding that my column had been given better play. Both had run in The Orange County Register on June 30, 1991. "Is there no room for new nations in the New World Order?" was...
Common Sense and North Korea
The phrase "common sense" implies practical and prudent good judgment, with a further implication that the obviousness of common sense is "common" because it is shared by many or even all. For example, 122 nations just signed a Treaty on Nuclear...
Why Did Robert Mueller Obstruct Congress’s 9/11 Probe?
Sixteen years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we still don’t know what happened. How did a ragtag bunch of hijackers, armed only with box cutters, manage to gain control of those airliners? How did they get into the United...
How the Pentagon Snatched Innovation From the Jaws of Defeat
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In the early 1950s, my father ran a gas station on Governors Island, a military base in New York harbor. In those years, it would be my only encounter with the suburbs. And there, for maybe a dime on any Saturday afternoon, I could...


