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Ed McMahon died earlier in the week well into his 80’s; he had a helluva life, as the tandem member of perhaps the perfect dual straight man opposite Carson’s straight man, and… all the other stuff. But I just don’t remember a day like this, where Farrah Fawcett died well before her time at only 62 after a struggle with cancer… but like a bolt from the blue, actor Jeff Goldblum fell from a cliff in New Zealand to his death at only 56, and the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson, died of some sort of cardiac arrest at...

In a Grey Lady op-ed by Stuart Beck, Palau’s UN rep, he debunks the right-wing meme that alleges that Palau will be taking a multi-million dollar ($200M) bribe to accept Uighur GTMO detainees. Mr. Beck insists its only relocation and housing costs and so forth of under $100K each. No matter what it is, the broader point is the same: no matter what the problem, whether it’s innocent men that our nation kidnapped and abused, or global warming, or drilling in the Arctic, or paying for our own government services by raising taxes, somehow we Americans are uniquely above hard...

The most exciting political development in a number of years (other than some guy named Obama, of course) is the inconceivable-ten-days-ago massive popular uprising in Iran, for which I can only tell you to keep checking in with Al Giordano, who gives us clear-headed analysis like this, or this, or this, that is just second to none. In a world of information overload, I’d just go right to these and cut through the media morass, as the corporate media continues to cower before the mighty power of the Iranian regime… even as the Iranian people courageously defy it! Who knows...

Dr. Ewart Brown, premier of the local government in Bermuda, has shown immense courage (more courage than the entire United States, btw) in accepting the entry of four completely innocent and found so by our courts former Uighur GTMO detainees… and as a result, the wahoo reactionary political elements in Bermuda are calling for a no-confidence vote (h/t Candace). Brown, and the Bermuda government, not to be confused with Gordon Brown and the UK government, who we would have thought had tacitly approved this in the first place but whose immediate reaction was to harumph about it, deserve our support...

What in God’s name is going in Iran? Keep your eyes on the prize, and, as is almost always the case where political legardemain appears to be going on in front of us, consult Al Giordano’s The Field, who tells us not to be so concerned about whether or not there was “electoral fraud” in Iran [hint: what matters is whether Iranians writ large feel the whole, rigged game of their system is entirely illegitimate, and what they will do about it… which right now, appears to be massive protests amidst government crackdowns, lockdowns and arrests] and Al also tells...

We’ll start with our friend Barb and this artice discussing the “principled” (as in “principal plus interest”) opposition of the American Medical Association to the “public option” being discussed with regard to healh care overhaul. Barb notes that the AMA, which acts not in the overall interest of physicians (most physicians, for example, are no longer even members), but of the economic interests of some stereotype of physicians; like the Chamber of Commerce, AMA is a classic special interest. Barb notes that the AMA has been opposing anything approaching “socialized medicine” since the Truman Administration (though I wrote to her...

Amidst talk that the [chicken-sh*t] Obama Administration [catering to a chicken sh*t morally bankrupt nation, that kidnaps men, tortures them, holds them for years in a dungeon, and then, when its government has long given up trying to prove these men did anything wrong or are any kind of a threat, instead resorts to crass demonization, fights off, ignores and then appeals a court order granting a habeas corpus writ directing their supervised release within the United States] would transfer the GTMO Chinese national Uighurs to the reliable American vassal independent Pacific island nation of Palau, as Andy tells is...

Glenn Greenwald continues to kick ass as he brings truth to power. This Salon piece documenting “liberal” news oulets, the N.Y. Times and National Palestine Radio (“NPR”), and their specific refusal to call torture torture, no matter how obvious that what they are describing (“intensive interrogation” [that occasionally results in death]) is torture, just hits it out of the park. The specific context is peculiarly alarming: an Obama Administration proposal to try to streamline guilty pleas leading to the death penalty. Just… cause for… concern? Look folks… I don’t like Khalid Sheik Mohammad any more than you do (and unlike...

E.J. Dionne of WaPo tells us in a column called “Rush and Newt are Winning” what regular readers here know to be true a moral certainty, though of course, it is squarely at odds with “conventional wisdom.” That is, of course, that the military-industrial-corporate-media-entertainment-complex does not suffer from left-wing bias at all. In point of fact, and as Mr. Dionne tells us in his column, the media is skewed right. This explains why psychotically reactionary maniac outliers like Gingrich and Limbaugh are depicted as legitimate harbingers of mainstream opinion, and why President Obama, who Dionne rightly notes is actually pretty...

It seems to be something about this time of year… maybe it’s just a coincidence that May or June seems to bring this sort of thing… to wit, the military is reporting the fifth “apparent suicide” (and sixth overall death) in the ignominious history of GTMO, America’s own gulag, now proudly managed by the Obama Administration (via Candace). Subject was Yemeni hunger striker, age 31, unrepresented until around February or so, and the government was doubtless giving whoever signed on to be his lawyers the runaround to the point where they never met their client… until eventually, Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah...