Blogs

The Pentagon has posted to its website the roughly 8,000 pages and audio tapes it was forced to provide to the New York Times regarding its “military analyst” program. Anyone who reads through them, as I’ve now done, can only be left with one conclusion (other than being extremely impressed with David Barstow’s work in [...]

Far from the glare of presidential politics, a serious debate is taking place on the future of U.S. space policy. Speaking recently in Colorado Springs, where the U.S. Air Force Space Command is headquartered, Republican Sen. Wayne Allard and Democratic Rep. Mark Udall agreed that the next president, to quote Allard, “will have to choose which [...]

When Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s alleged driver, returned to court recently for yet another hearing in his long odyssey through the ad hoc US legal system for suspected terrorists, he had an unlikely ally — Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor who charged him with war crimes in May 2007. Davis was there [...]

After the mainstream media’s weeks of obsession with Rev. Wright, some of which continued even after Senator Obama denounced him in no unequivocal terms, many bloggers and activists seem to have succeeded in getting the media to again do what it is supposed to do: cover the issues that matter most to people. If we were [...]

Last month, a review of 2006 congressional financial disclosure statements by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics found that lawmakers have as much as $196 million “invested in companies doing business with the Defense Department, earning millions since the start of the Iraq war.” An Associated Press article on the report, however, offered a caveat: [...]

Some readers resented The Washington Post for publishing an Associated Press photograph of a critically wounded Iraqi child being lifted from the rubble of his home in Baghdad’s Sadr City “after a U.S. airstrike.” Two-year-old Ali Hussein later died in a hospital. As the saying goes, the picture was worth a thousand words because it showed the [...]

The mainstream media are as likely to report on Pentagon propaganda — and thus, themselves — as President Bush is likely to cede that “mission accomplished” was poor phrasing. That is, it ain’t ever gonna happen. The mainstream media have instituted a news blackout on the New York Times exposé, casting [...]

While some are warning of a hunger tsunami, others are wetting their appetites for a new reality television program combining competitive food eating with intense physical challenges (No, I am not making this stuff up) in this latest installment of what I like to call “Why They Hate Us.” The premise goes a little like this: [...]

Mildred Loving died of pneumonia last Friday at her home in Central Point, Virginia. As reporter Jocelyn Stewart wrote in an obituary in the Los Angeles Times, “For marrying the only man she loved, Mildred loving paid a price: she was arrested, convicted and banished from her home state.” She and her now-deceased husband were [...]

There is direct evidence that President George W. Bush did not honorably lead this nation, but deliberately misled it into a war he wanted. Bush and his administration knowingly lied to Congress and to the American public — lies that have cost the lives of more than 4,000 young American soldiers and close to $1 [...]

The presence of the US military, 63 years after World War II, is a huge source of anger for the citizens of Japan, Korea, Germany and Italy. On the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, the US military uses an artillery firing range known as Yausubetsu. The artillery range is small in comparison to [...]

Nineteen years ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall effectively eliminated the Soviet Union as the world’s other superpower. Yes, the USSR as a political entity stumbled on for another two years, but it was clearly an ex-superpower from the moment it lost control over its satellites in Eastern Europe. Less than a month ago, [...]

By most accounts, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is genuinely passionate about reducing global poverty. But he is not willing to challenge the structures of the global economy that generate poverty, or the corporations that build, benefit from and maintain those structures. Nor, apparently, is he immune to gimmicky notions of corporate leadership to support development, or [...]

And what shall we talk about today, my friends? Because unless you are new to these pages and perhaps even now considering whether to pass over this too large block of pictureless text, you are to at least a degree some sort of friend of mine. And two weeks, several adventures, minor advances and predictable [...]

Scot sent me this link as a way to provide direct aid to folks in Myanmar:

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/burma_cyclone/4.php?cl=86297331

Overall, I like this group (Avaaz), and am looking forward to hearing more from them.

Though there are still primaries left, the Democratic Party may be headed for an August dilemma. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama is likely to enter the convention with a clinching majority of committed delegates chosen by voters in primaries and caucuses, but Obama is almost guaranteed to have more of them. So, barring a [...]

To the extent that Americans believe voter registration is easy — and polls show a large majority of Americans do — it is because of the federal National Voter Registration Act of 1993, also known as the Motor Voter Act. The NVRA requires states to offer individuals an opportunity to register to vote when they apply [...]

Sami al-Haj is a free man today, after having been imprisoned by the U.S. military for more than six years. His crime: journalism. Targeting journalists, the Bush administration has engaged in direct assault, intimidation, imprisonment and information blackouts to limit the ability of journalists to do their jobs. The principal target these past seven years has [...]

During the many years that I lived in the United States, first as a university student, then as reporter for two Midwest newspapers and later as the Washington correspondent for the Star, I was always struck by the huge divide between blacks and whites. As a Canadian from small-town Ontario, I was initially somewhat naive about [...]

The confluence of two forces — a massive military expansion in Hawai’i and Congressional legislation that will stymie the Kanaka Maoli [Native Hawaiian] sovereignty movement — will expand and consolidate the use of Hawai’i for US empire. We are calling on the US left to join our movement opposing these threats and to add our [...]