sfarber

Another day, another set of bloody bomb attacks in Baghdad. No surprise there, sadly. But this day, a suicide bomber made it well inside the Green Zone to blow up inside of the Iraqi parliament building, kiiling two Sunni members of parliament, wounding others and killing at least six more. Also in Baghdad, another bomber managed to blow up the Tigris River crossing known as the Sarafiya Bridge, killing at least six more. It’s really hard to know what exactly is happening over there; River hasn’t posted in nearly two months. Senator McCain and Congressman Dunce Pence tell us things...

Author Kurt Vonnegut passed away at age 84. Either you are already familiar with such works as Slaughterhouse Five, the Sirens of Titan and God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater, and Vonnegut’s 14 novels, and his alternative universe style of humoristic, science-fictionistic… reality, asking the great questions in the tradition of the all time greats like Chekhov and Shakespeare and Voltaire, et al., i.e. “what does it mean to be human in a mostly inhuman world?”… or you’re not. I met Vonnegut [yes, it’s always about me on this blog] in 1983, around the hey-day of anti-nuclear activity, at an anti-nuclear...

The same day that Democratic hawk Senator Joe “Imus Regular” Biden announced his view that the Iraq war cannot be won under Bush’s policies (including The SurgeTM), and that General Petraeus is misleading us with his optimism… the new Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, announced that the active duty military would see their tours of duty in Iraq extended from 12 to 15 months, making them the longest tours since the Second World War, and extending the ongoing tours of thousands of troops already there, and thousands more about to go, often for the second or third time. [It all makes...

In a bizarre career saving move, the Rev. Al Sharpton helped manage to stave off the imminent (and well-deserved) end of the career of right-wing-radio shill Don Imus, by calling for his firing on Sharpton’s radio program, which Imus appeared on. As a result of Sharpton’s intervention, Imus was only given a two-week suspension, instead of what would have been a (more than well deserved) pink slip. You will recall that the context of this is Imus’s unprovoked remarks calling members of the national runner-up Rutgers’ women basketball team “Nappy headed hos”. Honestly… what in God’s name brought that up?...

Amnesty International has issued a new report stating that conditions for detainees at Guantanamo are… wait for it… deteriorating. As around just under half of the “Worst terrorists in the history of the world(TM)” have been released without so much as being charged let alone tried, the remaining uncharged, untried detainees find themselves more and more likely to be in super-max conditions, isolated from other human beings almost all the time, rarely seeing sunlight, subject to harsh interrogations… even after years of already being questioned and it being well-established they know nothing… already on top of five years of chargeless,...

I said most of what I wanted to say about our Miss Goodling in this post; nonetheless, it is gratifying to see that she will no longer collect a government salary, effective immediately, insofar as she has resigned the high level Justice Department post she should never have had in the first place (her presence, along with her boss Abu Gonzales, further besmirching the once proud department where I happened to have begun my own career.) There is no room in my heart for vicious and incompetent Macchiavellians who devote their lives to saying Jesus’s name a lot while living...

Recess appointments continue to be the President’s favored way of “getting his team” on board (when other shady evasions of Senate confirmation aren’t made available by sneaking them into the USA PATRIOT Act, such as with the recent U.S. Attorney scandal); in this case, the President makes three more recess appointments, led by Swiftboat Veterans for Truth contributor Sam Fox being appointed envoy to Belgium. We shouldn’t be all that appalled: sometimes, the Senate may miss out on the opportunity for great public servants, such as our recently “recess appointed” United Nations Ambassador John Bolton. Snarkiness aside, it reflects a...

It appears that the diplomatic and rhetorical stand-off between Britain and Iran over the plight of 15 British sailors captured in waters between Iraq and Iran has been resolved, with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad apparently “pardoning” the 15, and advising that they would be released shortly. You will recall our President’s desperate efforts to escalate this minor standoff (a previous standoff like this resulted in the release of the British troops involved, unharmed) into a casus belli to save his own failed presidency by calling the captured (and soon to be released) sailors as “hostages” ini the hope of bringing...

And so, we come to the next stage of the “case” against David Hicks, a/k/a “the Australian Taliban”, a/k/a “the worst of the worst,”… the man so bad, that thus far, he has been the first and only man charged under the newfangled military commission system passed last year by a Republican-led Congress (with the complicity of a few feckless Democrats who will also eventually have to answer to God for their role in turning our nation back to the year 1214)… Hicks’ punishment, after his guilty plea for “material support of terrorism in general”? Nine months, with most of...