That great bulk, Jerry Falwell, has eaten his last family-size bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Yes, Jerry has ordered his last tent-sized silk suit, taken his last bag of cash from lonely old ladies, and ordered his last truckload of cheap, merchandising Bibles with his picture stamped on the cover. Gone on to his reward, as they say.

He donated his organs, the only gesture of kindness recorded in his adult life, but they were all rejected, except for the spleen, reportedly large enough to serve three. More...

The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn't join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who've forgotten the tune.
Excerpt "God Bless America," Harold Pinter, January 2003

Preceeding generations had every reason to believe those following them would step into the breach and continue the vigil over this nation's Constitutional freedoms and, if necessary, fight to preserve them. They believed, like George Washington warned -- "Government is a "force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action." And they remembered, from generation to generation. Unfortunately, those following our generation will have no such luxury. More...

"Demagogue" is often applied to one who spouts spurious oratory that nonetheless is emotionally stirring. We think of people such as Hitler, Mussolini, or the American neofascist Father Coughlin when we use words such as 'demagogue' or 'demagoguery'. These three men had an oratorical gift, which is why I never feel totally comfortable referring to the inarticulate Bush as a 'demagogue', most notably when he speaks off the cuff. In either case, his language is nonetheless often marked by some of the classic devices of demagoguery. More...

Bracing for 2008 presidential election, US Democrats in opposition and the ruling Republicans have embroiled the American public in a political crisis between the executive and legislative powers over deadlines for combat operations in Iraq that could develop into a constitutional showdown, but for Arabs and Iraqis in particular it is merely playing electoral politics with Iraqi blood for oil because the Democratic Alternative for President George W. Bush’s strategy, when scrutinized, promises them no fundamental change to the bloody status quo. More...

"A lost infant in the ashes, lost faces in the dust, a lost finger in the garbage dumps, a lost mother in the debris, a nation lost in the fire, a country lost in the greed...and eyes lost in that endless tunnel of helplessness, anguish and despair...lost in the total emptiness, in the void of the living dead."~~Layla Anwar, "Ashes & Dust"

Sometimes I wonder if Americans are unaware of the malicious devastation the Bush administrtion is wreaking upon this good earth and its inhabitants, or if they just don't give a damn. I wonder if they ever put a "face" on even one of the hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children who are lost forever -- victims of arrogance, lust for power, insatiable greed. And lies .. all lost because of evil, deliberate lies. More...

Instead of building a diplomatic momentum on the political breakthrough mediated by their Saudi Arabian ally who succeeded in developing an Arab and Palestinian consensus on going along with the U.S.-steered Quartet efforts to revive the deadlocked peace process, the American diplomacy has turned their sponsored Palestinian – Israeli summit meeting in Jerusalem on Monday from a promising event into a missed opportunity, thus shaking off a burgeoning potential for a more coordinated regional U.S. – Arab front. More...

Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."~~Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

If the Bush administration and the US mainstream media are united on any one issue, it's an absolute refusal to rock the political boat as they sail mercilessly through the seas of corporate profit on the good ship Terrorbush. For the most part, each group is an incurious lot -- undead creatures who neither care, nor dare, to glance over the side of the ship at the bloated, swirling bodies in the blood-red water below. From the beginning, their mission has been to perform so fantastically against a backdrop of such violent, explosive madness on so many fronts that we watch hypnotically but do not see -- listen intently but do not hear. More...

War in Iraq cost just the US army about $4.7 billion per month, which makes $56.4 billion per year. If we consider that Iraq has some 28 million citizens, and considering that great majority of them makes less than $100 per month. If one would want to make peace and reconstruction of Iraq, and pay all Iraqi citizens over the age of ten a "war benefit" (except those directly involved in Sadam's government, and those that earn more than that), say $150 per month, that would make the monthly sum of $4.2 billion, and $50.4 billion per year. Although this proposition is exaggerated because it considers all living citizens in Iraq, it still clearly shows that it would be far cheaper to pay Iraqis to do nothing, then use the army to fight the war against them, because the war brought them most extreme misery and hardship instead of progress, which they would expect after Sadam's "tyranny". Paying them, lets call it "war benefit", the American military involvement could of been over in a year, with Iraqi citizens celebrating America. Instead, Bush administration has chosen the most expensive solutions which multiplies the war expenditure to $378 billion until March this year, and we have total chaos and disintegration of society as a whole, with over 150.000 dead Iraqi and 3115 dead, and over 35.000 non mortal American casualties, and to top it all, decent American taxpayer is going to pay for all this for long years to come in many more ways than tax. More...

I used to think that we had an obligation to stay in Iraq for a while, to rebuild the country that we have destroyed over the past four years. As a human rights advocate, my primary concern is for the wellbeing of the innocent Iraqi civilians. Don't we owe them a rebuilt infrastructure, rebuilt homes, rebuilt schools, and rebuilt lives? You break it, you fix it. It's only fair.

But, with each passing day, I find myself thinking more and more that it's time to cut our losses - and the losses of the Iraqi people - and bring our troops home, along with all those corporate contractors who are getting rich off the blood of the war dead. More...

"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force." -- Ayn Rand, The Nature of Government

I have no desire to get embroiled in the current tangled debate on immigration, either legal or illegal. However, I have watched with interest the intense campaign for President Bush first to intervene in the trial of two border patrol agents accused of shooting a suspected Mexican drug dealer as he fled, and then to pardon the agents for the crime after they were convicted. More...

You can’t make this stuff up. George Bush believes that “the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude.” On the other side of the political divide, Presidential hopeful Joseph Biden - a sponsor of the anti-surge legislation pending before Congress - maintains that we’ve “done enough for the Iraqis.”

What a strange war we’re having in Iraq. After four years of shifting rationales, Americans remain clueless about why Bush opened this Pandora’s box. The cold math that led to this disastrous imperial project is just too much for the pundits to own up to. More...

President George W. Bush’s paradoxical “new strategy” in Iraq is doomed by its own contradictions as much as by Iraqi and regional paradoxes and would in no time prove that the U.S. president’s go-it-alone approach will only extend the failure of the 2003 military invasion in developing into a permanent occupation, amid wide spread world and American calls for withdrawal and political solution. More...

What else can be said about a dead dictator? Do we miss him? Hardly. Did he commit horrendous crimes? Undoubtedly. Still, Saddam Hussein’s hanging today is much more and much less than advertised. His execution fell far short of justice, and killing him was not only unnecessary but brutal.

While hooded Iraqis pulled the levers that caused Saddam to fall through the trap door to his neck-wrenching death, it was George Bush pulling the strings. The Iraqi government has only as much power as the U.S. allows, and they are give free reign only when their ideas match those of the Bush administration. So it is foolish to claim that Iraqis served justice on their former dictator; instead, it was the revenge of George Bush, who chose to sleep through the hanging. More...

Or is that “oozing”? Either way, George Bush is full of it, compassion, that is, or at least the appearance of compassion. He visited wounded troops today at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. For Bush, this is progress. For years he denied the dead and wounded even existed; he prevented photographers from even snapping returning caskets. But now he’s compassionate. He feels their pain.

While with the children of the wounded, who were wrapping gifts for their parents, Bush first was confused about whether the family was wounded or just one of the parents --hint, it’s both -- and then stammered as he tried to say what happened: it was “in -- in -- in combat.” More...

"Standing next to me in this lonely crowd,
Is a man who swears he's not to blame." --Bob Dylan


It has been reported that George W. Bush is counting on the judgment of history to redeem the perception that he has been at the helm of a failed presidency. This notion is as muttering-at-the-wallpaper crazy as had Jeffery Dahmer, before his murder, been expecting gourmet chefs to someday champion his culinary choices. In the present day United States, our insulated leaders (who merely reflect the insularity of the daily lives of the nation's people) have shunned reality to such a degree, one would think that they spend their time writing wishful letters to Santa Claus instead of creating policy and law. More...

The Grand Jury indictment was hand delivered in a plain brown envelope. Because it arrived late, I decided to have dinner before unsealing the package. I had enough clues about the contents to know it was going to be a long night.

By dawn – I was still up desperately fighting off the temptation to sleep. Every page of the indictment revived buried memories from the scene of the crime. Long forgotten details were resurrected in vivid color. To my surprise, there was also a lot of evidence that I wasn’t aware of – the kind of details only a professional investigator knows how to dig up. More...