And so Israel prepares to invade the Gaza Strip (again)… this time to rescue a kidnapped soldier (Corporal Gilad Shalit) that Palestinian idiots militants kidnapped after tunnelling under the border with Israel and attacking a border post, kililing two other Israeli soldiers in the process. The kidnapped soldier’s fate is a big deal to Israel, which will put up with almost anything directed against its civilians, but goes absolutely mad when anyone attacks its soldiers. (Such is the nature of truly universal conscription, at least in Israel. There is also another missing Israeli, believed to be in the hands of...

We are losing troops and spending billions of dollars in Iraq, each and every week. The Taliban may be regrouping in Afghanistan. OBL and the AQ leadership remains at large. The federal budget deficit, and our trade gap, are at record levels with little relief in sight. Scientists are making troubling new findings about global warming. Tens of millions of Americans feel their jobs are threatened by illegal immigration, and there has been no minimum wage increase for over a decade. With all this going on, of course, it’s obvious what the most important issue of the day is, warranting...

In the “way too much information” department, we get this report out of Palm Beach, Florida, indicating that Rush Limbaugh was stopped at the airport in Palm Beach when returning from the Dominican Republic on a private plane after authorities discovered a bottle containing Viagra with a label indicating that the prescription was issued to two doctors, but not to Limbaugh himself. That Houdini of the legal profession (and counsel to Limbaugh) Roy Black immediately came up with a credible sounding excuse for this almost certain violation of Limbaugh’s probation on other drug charges (so credible that Limbaugh wasn’t charged)...

The “we wish she were still blogging” Granny sends us a variety of links, including the map above (which shows a projected new 10-lane wide “NAFTA superhighway” to replace I-35 and some other roads, literally from our Southern border at Laredo, TX to our Northern border and on into Canada, with attendant Canadian and Mexican elements, whose ultimate intention and effect will be to allow a smooth American-union-worker-free movement of cheap goods from the Far East (China, mostly) through the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas, thus by-passing the Port of Los Angeles (and its container port which was built with...

General George Casey has proposed a number of planned troop reductions of American forces in Iraq, including some reduction by [politically critical] September, and a reduction to about half of the number of combat brigades by the end of next year. It is unclear what effect this will have on total number of troops. Why doesn’t General Casey want to stay the course? Doesn’t he know that an announced reduction in the American military presence only benefits our enemies? Sheesh. Somebody check Casey’s voter registration card: he’s doubtless a traitorous Democrat. [In some sense, these troop reductions are coming much...

And so we learn of yet another secret Bush Administration program eavesdropping on activities many Americans might have thought beyond the government’s snooping ability absent a warrant, in this case, secret monitoring of bank wire transactions, which (naturally) the Vice-President was quick to condemn (the disclosure of, that is, not the program, which he obviously likes, having approved it and all). This is an interesting area, because, of course, unlike the apparent monitoring of tens of millions of telephone records, one would ordinarily think that people might just have a tad less of a privacy interest in this kind of...

Although it’s still June, it looks like the consortium of major news outlets and Republican operatives that control what we see and hear have gotten it together, and given us a look at what we’ll be seeing between now and Election Day. We’ll start with the announcement of the arrests of seven young men in Miami who are certainly guilty of being Moslem and of living in a warehouse in the (heavily minority) Liberty City area, and having “aspirations” but “no means” of blowing things up… let me repeat that minor point: they had absolutely no means whatsoever to carry...

A National Academy of Sciences study (commissioned by a Republican Congressman) demonstrates that the Earth is currently the hottest it has been in some time.… at least for the last 400 years, and probably for the last 2,000 years. The study concludes that greenhouse gases are largely responsible for this, as well as other factors. The Bush Administration, of course, opposes various pollution control measures, that it contends will cost American jobs. Well, look: the industrial era started long before George W. Bush became President, and indeed, long before George W. Bush was born. This is an ongoing problem, that...

The New York Times, itself oh so instrumental in uncritically adopting Administration propaganda (and IMHO committing war crimes in the process, at least to the extent that similar actions to its resulted in the occasional conviction and death sentence at Nuremberg) that helped get us into Iraq, now offers us this discussion of Congressional Republicans’ exploitation of some Democrats’ call for a timetable for American withdrawal– a timetable favored by an overwhelming majority of Iraqis, btw. Katrina. Let me make this easy. We can’t really leave Iraq; no, we shouldn’t be there in the first place, but we’re there, and...

Taking an unfortunate page from Henry VI, it seems that Shia militias are content to try their own hand at killing all the lawyers, in this case, Khamis al-Obeidi, the third lawyer for Saddam Hussein or co-defendants to be killed during the course of his trial. (Trials are hard enough to prepare for without having to worry about whether you and/or your family will be kidnapped, tortured and murdered. For better or worse, Saddam’s lawyers are just trying to do their damned jobs… like it or not, everyone is entitled to a defense, no matter how distasteful or even monstrous...