Call me gob-smacked to find that Sun-Kyung Cho, the sister of the Virginia Tech mass-murderer, is employed by the Bush Administration in an Iraq reconstruction function. At the moment, she appears to work for a contractor called McNeil Technologies, but the Princeton grad seems to have worked for the State Department in the successor to the Coalition Provisional Authority, either directly or indirectly in at least three stints. Given the Coalition Provisional Authority’s sordid history of hiring only inexperienced but connected Republican operatives for its crucial budgetary functions, we can more than reasonably conclude that in order to get her...

Those of us who were kind of troubled by the inability to mount a successful fillibuster of Scam Alito’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court get to shake our heads and say “surprise, surprise”… the High Court voted to dispense with a number of earlier precedents and outright find a so-called partial birth abortion ban constitutional (5-4… of course.) I’ll defer to Scott Lemieux’s observations on this; I think the short answer is “it’s about the patriarchy, stupid.” You little ladies don’t really know what to do with your bodies so we’ll tell you for your own good. Note that...

Frankly, there is no particular reason to talk about the issue of gun control, one way or another… let the Virginia Tech shooting sink in a bit, give it the distance of at least a few weeks. That’s not how politics works, of course. So naturally, it’s nice to see the Democrats in majority, led by Harry Reid. conceding the issue before it even starts. As always, Democrats are keen to believe Republican talking points, such as that it was the assault weapons ban back in 1994 (and that law alone) that led to the 1994 “Republican Revolution.” We won’t...

Words fail me in talking about the worst-ever-gun-rampage-in-American-history that left 32 people dead after a shooting spree at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, VA yesterday. Perhaps there is something frightening about April in this country… (T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land called April the cruelest month)… we had the Oklahoma City bombing 12 years ago this week, the Columbine shootings 8 years ago this week… and now this. I don’t know. What events like this show is that neither I, nor anyone else I know, seem to know anything about what makes the universe– or especially the human soul– tick. An...

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,...