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Friday, January 13, 2012 - 23:59
Hugo Chavez is at it again, sticking his thumb into the eye of the overbearing United States of America. And, true to imperial historical form, the US is playing the outraged hemispherical nanny and blustering back.
Chavez is currently playing a round of the game my-enemy’s-...
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Monday, January 2, 2012 - 23:11
Ever since George W. Bush lost the popular vote by 500,000 souls and was selected President by a right-leaning Supreme Court, the United States has seemed to me devoted to a twisted fate of slow-motion Armageddon.
What seems to guarantee this is one of our most...
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Sunday, December 18, 2011 - 16:08
(Photos: John Grant)
Ft. Meade -- Saturday, December...
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Monday, December 5, 2011 - 14:28
Following a decade of military invasion and occupation in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, the United States is becoming the Rodney Dangerfield of empires: “We get no respect!”
The undisputed post-World War Two top dog in the world, on virtually every front the United...
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Monday, November 28, 2011 - 18:11
Christmas has come a long way from the three wise men on camels visiting the Baby Jesus in a manger in a Middle Eastern desert or from the anti-capitalist-greed morality tale of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Now we have a holiday cartoon blockbuster called...
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Thursday, November 17, 2011 - 19:29
With a $55 million construction contract “imminent” for Dilworth Plaza -- home since early October for Occupy Philadelphia – the city trade unions and those in Occupy Philly determined to hold-out in the Plaza have arrived at a showdown.
Everything in life is a dialogue with...
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Sunday, November 6, 2011 - 13:50
We’re living through an interesting juncture in history. On one hand, there’s the amazing bottom-up Occupy Movement, and no one knows quite where and how far it will go. Then, there’s the field of Republican neo-Know-Nothing,...
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Sunday, October 30, 2011 - 16:58
The people, unfortunately, are still very ignorant, and are kept in ignorance by the systematic efforts of all the governments, who consider this ignorance, not without good reason, as one of the essential conditions of their own power.
-Mikhail...
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Thursday, October 20, 2011 - 06:20
As far as anyone knew I was part of this cause -- a cause that I had infiltrated the day before in order to mock and undermine in the pages of The American Spectator -- and I wasn’t giving up before I had my story.
Patrick Howley
...
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Saturday, October 15, 2011 - 08:56
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Saturday, October 8, 2011 - 11:38
“The First Amendment right to gather news is, as the Court has often noted, not one that inures solely to the benefit of the news media; rather, the public’s right of access to information is coextensive with that of the press.”
- United States Court of Appeals...
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Wednesday, September 28, 2011 - 22:47
Honorable people like to debate whether the United States of America is a "police state," but when it comes to shutting down the expression of ideas on the political left, there's little room for argument.
We are inundated in this country with propaganda boilerplate about...
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Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - 18:17
At what point does Israel and its complicated settlement situation become a liability for the United States as Americans cope with the growing pain of recession and decline?
The United States has been an enthusiastic partner of Israel’s worst Iron Wall policies since the...
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Wednesday, August 31, 2011 - 17:08
It’s a sad reality of our day that denial and bullshit seem the most useful talents to getting elected and to govern in America.
Bullshit is meant in the sense used by Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his popular book titled On Bullshit. He defines...
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Friday, August 12, 2011 - 23:15
How do you assure the security of a nation of human beings who consume a disproportionate amount of the world’s resources, habitually live beyond their means and are addicted to all forms of fantasy from Bible-based delusion, to patriotism-based arrogance, to movie special effects...
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Sunday, July 31, 2011 - 22:52
When the human waste of politics gets to piling up so deep you want to run screaming into the night, a good remedy is to fall back to the powerful historical minds and immerse yourself in some great writing. I ran into this dilemma last Sunday, after a morning of reading The...
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Friday, July 22, 2011 - 21:58
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks.
You've been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald's books.
You're very well read
It's well known.
But something is happening here...
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Tuesday, July 12, 2011 - 23:16
What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? ... You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now.
-- Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
...
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Friday, July 1, 2011 - 23:12
Israel and its international operatives are working overtime to stop the 10-ship Gaza flotilla from leaving Athens. The Audacity Of Hope, with 40 Americans on board, tried to leave the harbor Friday only to be chased down and threatened by an armed Greek Coast Guard boat...
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Friday, June 24, 2011 - 20:34
Two veteran friends of mine will be on one of the ships planning to leave Athens next week to challenge the Israeli sea blockade of Gaza. The Israeli government, after attacking a previous flotilla in May 2010 and killing nine people, has said it will use violence if necessary to...
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Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - 13:02
Some years ago, I was photographing a constitutional law professor for a magazine article on his book, and while I composed my shots I employed the usual half-minded topical banter to keep things on course. The professor was pretty progressive and knew I was a veteran antiwar...
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Wednesday, June 8, 2011 - 22:59
"A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us,...
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Tuesday, May 24, 2011 - 16:25
John Fleming is a 58-year-old African American born and raised in Philadelphia who served in the Army from 1969 to 1972 maintaining nuclear weapons in silos in Germany.
It was 10:45 AM on Friday outside Courtroom 1006 in Philadelphia’s Criminal Justice Center. Fleming had...
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Friday, May 13, 2011 - 07:37
I know when night has gone
That a new world's born at dawn.
I'll keep rolling along
Deep in my heart is a song
Here on the range I belong
Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.
"...
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Thursday, May 5, 2011 - 21:20
Supplying an army at a distance drains the public coffers and impoverishes the common people.
-- Sun-Tzu, The Art of War
With the killing of Osama bin Laden by a 79-member JSOC hunter/killer team inside Pakistan, the nation has...
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Wednesday, April 27, 2011 - 22:19
Some men rob you with a six gun.
Some do it with a fountain pen.
“Pretty Boy Floyd”
Woody Guthrie
_____________________
We hear a lot about what democracy means in America. In the case of the Cheri Honkala Green Party...
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Wednesday, April 20, 2011 - 00:33
“The Americans have not been honest about this, even among themselves.”
That’s how Mullah Attullah Lodin, deputy chairman of the High Peace Council of Afghanistan, sees our nation and its government as it relates to the question of permanent bases in Afghanistan and to his...
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Wednesday, April 13, 2011 - 22:22
The battle over the meaning of a traumatic experience is fought in the arena of political discourse, popular culture and scholarly debate. The outcome of this battle shapes the rhetoric of the dominant culture and influences future political action.
--Kali...
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Thursday, April 7, 2011 - 16:42
Peace is in the air and its blowing around like little specks of Spring pollen. Maybe it’s a good time for the US government to recognize this hopeful spirit of Spring and try to figure out a new tack in its foreign war policy.
US war policy is still very much bogged down...
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Thursday, March 31, 2011 - 15:43
"...get a man greedy enough and he got the guts to go – go, go, ...Vietnam, hot damn."
-Norman Mailer, Why Are We In Vietnam?
The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the program created by Congress to expend over $700 billion of our...
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Sunday, March 27, 2011 - 22:24
And we never really face what is in front of us, never face what is inside our gutless language of cartels and drug lords and homeland security, never face that forces are unleashed on the land with names like poverty, a fix, murder, and despair, and our tools cannot master...
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Sunday, March 20, 2011 - 22:15
A contingent of 20 right-wing veterans with flags and signs declaring their devotion to “our troops,” marched up to the blocked-off Pennsylvania Avenue area in front of the White House. One of the men wore a blue shirt with Army Security Agency printed on it.
“I...
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Thursday, March 10, 2011 - 23:39
Here’s a modest proposal for President Obama and our policy wizards to consider:
General Petraeus has provided laudable service to his great nation by pulling counter-insurgency theory from the wreckage of Vietnam and giving it CPR; and after his predecessor self-immolated...
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Saturday, March 5, 2011 - 14:21
Stripping before men still clothed is the first step toward weakening the prisoner’s psychological defense. … But stripping is also sexually laden. It transposes sexual gestures, acts and innuendo from a strip club to the torture chamber. Thus sex is always present in the...
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Sunday, February 27, 2011 - 15:55
It’s considered unsportsmanlike to say, “We told you so.” But since all’s fair in love and war and we’re definitely at war, it’s fair to say the peace movement has been right about the whole sordid reality of US war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That may sound audacious or...
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Friday, February 25, 2011 - 09:13
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Thursday, February 17, 2011 - 23:20
A well-known Philadelphia poor peoples advocate has decided to try something different. She’s running for Sheriff of Philadelphia.
Cheri Honkala, founder of the local Kensington Welfare Rights Union and national director of the Poor Peoples Economic Human Rights Campaign,...
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Friday, February 11, 2011 - 00:17
Hosni Mubarak has chosen not to fold his losing hand and to play it to the bitter end.
After the CIA and the Egyptian military said he was going to resign, he didn’t, which further escalated the tension around the question hanging over Cairo: Who is the military going to...
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Sunday, January 30, 2011 - 20:17
It was a dark and stormy night and Scat Horbath was glad to be out of the weather in the Washington DC metro, where he was to meet the sinister Ali Ben al-Masseur in the last car of the Blue Train.
Al-Masseur ran the Brothers Of Islam Charity Center in Arlington...
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Friday, January 21, 2011 - 15:59
Recent indicators suggest the US military mission in the Middle East and Southwest Asia is waning in influence, leaving us mired down with hundreds of thousands of soldiers and billions of dollars of equipment and bases. And a lot of face to save.
According to a...
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Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - 23:52
Hello darkness my old friend,
I’ve come to talk with you again,
- Paul Simon, 1964
...
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Thursday, January 6, 2011 - 00:01
The War On Drugs, fought mostly in poor and person-of-color communities (despite the fact that whites are more than 70 percent of all drug users) has contributed dramatically to the growth of a prison-industrial-complex that is quickly sapping resources from education, job training and other...
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Friday, December 24, 2010 - 17:38
On December 18, David House, an MIT researcher, visited Bradley Manning at the Quantico, Virginia, military prison where he is being held in solitary confinement. Other than Manning’s attorney, House is the rare person allowed to visit him.
...
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Monday, December 20, 2010 - 00:39
Washington--Defense Secretary Robert Gates may be the consummate insider bureaucrat and a nice man, but his calling our war in the Pashtun homeland “the meat in the sandwich” begins to get at the real problem of the Afghanistan/Pakistan War.
Besides being a preposterously...
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Saturday, December 11, 2010 - 22:51
It is the climactic scene. Dorothy and her friends stand before the great Wizard of Oz. Toto wanders off and yanks back a curtain to reveal a man busy manipulating levers. Whistles and smoke bombs go off, and the great Oz thunders: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”...
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Thursday, December 2, 2010 - 00:28
“The problem here is to define ... a form of life that
would not depend on an unsustainable relation of domination
over the rest of the world.” Jean Bricmont
We live in a time of incredible change, and to have any say at all in the direction that change will take...
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Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - 17:57
It was the fifteenth time I’d trekked to Columbus, Georgia, to the gate of Fort Benning, for the annual November demonstration to close the School of the Americas.
Since 1989, following the murder of six Jesuit priests in San Salvador by graduates of the SOA, the effort to close it down...
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Monday, November 15, 2010 - 00:13
Sergeant Salvatore Giunta will receive a Congressional Medal of Honor this week for bravery under fire in October 2007. At great risk, he assaulted a hill and rescued a gravely wounded comrade being dragged away by an insurgent. He will be the first living soldier to receive the medal since the...
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Friday, November 5, 2010 - 22:38
This huge and confusing thing we call the United States of America is in the midst of a major epochal reality check, not your usual, garden-variety recession. The roots of today’s crises go back at least 60 years or more.
Politics in such a crisis state is naturally volatile, swinging...
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Friday, October 29, 2010 - 00:44
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
-Opening line in William Gibson’s Neuromancer
I recently took a tour of Best Buy to see what’s going on in the world of consumer electronics. Technology was on my mind. I had just been...
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Thursday, October 21, 2010 - 23:58
The government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and major social transformations to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the freedoms and individual rights we hold as fundamental today.
-...
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Saturday, October 16, 2010 - 00:02
Psychoanalysis enables us to point to some trace or other
of a homosexual object-choice in everyone. … It can be traced
back to the constitutional bisexuality of all human beings.
Sigmund Freud
If Sigmund Freud is right that all...
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Friday, October 8, 2010 - 22:59
The only way to survive such an insane system is to be insane oneself.
- Joseph Heller
When the going gets weird, the weird go pro.
- Hunter Thompson
The Pentagon has its hands full in Afghanistan trying to make...
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Thursday, September 30, 2010 - 22:54
At least fifty people were injured and several killed in struggles around Quito’s National Police Hospital where Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa was taken Thursday after being injured by a tear gas canister shot at him by a protesting police officer.
Insurgent police kept the president...
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Wednesday, September 22, 2010 - 13:42
At the beginning of the Iraq “surge” in 2007, Senator Barack Obama was leery of General David Petraeus, but now, we learn, he has warmed to the four-star Pentagon celebrity and calls him “Dave.”
In meetings, according to an anonymous White House official, when the talk is of Afghanistan,...
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Wednesday, September 15, 2010 - 22:58
“The Obama administration is debating whether to make Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, a more central player in efforts to root out corruption in his own government, including giving him more oversight of graft investigations and notifying him before any arrests.”
This was the lead...
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Wednesday, September 8, 2010 - 21:51
Corruption is more and more being built up as our greatest problem in Afghanistan. It’s all over the newspapers and the TV. At the epi-center of this corruption, the Kabul Bank we helped create and maintain has run aground and there’s talk in the air of a financial bail-out.
Meanwhile,...
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Thursday, September 2, 2010 - 00:54
Last Saturday, I pondered America’s soul.
I was in Portland, Maine, attending the annual Veterans For Peace convention, which featured Chris Hedges as its keynote speaker. Hedges, a Harvard divinity graduate who worked for many years as a war correspondent in El Salvador, Bosnia and other...
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Wednesday, August 25, 2010 - 15:54
“Taft is a fathead.” (Theodore Roosevelt, 1912)
The anti-gay blog QueerHunt has just launched an expose that General David Petraeus is gay and has a secret Arab boyfriend he periodically meets in a Dubai hotel. The young man goes by the code name ‘awrence, an...
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Thursday, August 19, 2010 - 00:50
First it was Press Secretary Robert Gibbs attacking the “professional left” (whatever that means) for wanting to "eliminate the Pentagon." Then the liberal New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd kicked the left for “constantly sniping at Obama" and for considering "pragmatism a moral...
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Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - 21:47
Poor Bradley Manning. The kid can’t catch a break. Not only does the military have him locked in some inhuman solitary hole where they can slow-torture him using the latest approved methods, now his troubled private life is being broadcast for all to see.
After running 75,000 secret...
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Monday, August 9, 2010 - 01:32
“Stubbornness and stupidity are twins.”
Sophocles
What is it about Americans that they have so much going for them, yet they can be so very stupid?
Two stories in the Sunday New York Times jumped out as a sad backdrop to our misguided War On...
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Monday, August 2, 2010 - 23:23
Let me get this straight. Robert Gates, the Secretary-Of-Defense-For-Life, is touring the TV news shows and major newspapers pleading with great angst lines in his forehead that WikiLeaks is “guilty” and “morally culpable” for releasing 75,000 field reports from Afghanistan to the American...
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Tuesday, July 27, 2010 - 23:25
This letter is being sent to PFC Bradley Manning at the following prison address in Kuwait. For obvious reasons, I’ve left my return address off this posting.
Inmate PFC Bradley Manning
TFCF - Theater Field Confinement Facility
APO AE 09366 USA
Dear PFC Manning...
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Monday, July 19, 2010 - 22:20
Military violence has such a death-grip on national policy in America, it’s hard for citizens to grasp there are real alternatives to war.
Marine General James Mattis, the man appointed by President Obama to replace General David Petraeus as leader of the Central Command that oversees all...
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Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - 00:18
There is a contest going on in America between the First and Second Amendments as to which has more favor in our court system. It's a face off between gun violence and freedom of the press and it involves individuals, giant corporations and standing armies.
...
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Monday, July 5, 2010 - 22:01
It’s tough these days being a non-violent peace activist. Many see the notion of “peace is the way” as laughable, and the government equates peace with military domination.
The bi-partisan War Party in America won’t budge from its imperial wars despite majority polls and protests urging...
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Monday, June 28, 2010 - 08:58
The US Army is holding Specialist Bradley Manning incommunicado in Kuwait on charges of leaking to WikiLeaks video of Apache helicopter pilots gunning down two Reuters cameramen and a number of Iraqis in a Baghdad neighborhood. The video is devastating in what it reveals about cold-blooded hi-...
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Thursday, June 24, 2010 - 01:28
Following the tidal wave of media buzz over General Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone, you quickly notice the story succumbing to the gravity of our media-circus culture, to the point it has become a story about celebrity and score keeping.
Would Obama fire McChrystal? How...
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Thursday, June 17, 2010 - 07:59
The truth about American politics is this: disguised by the theatrics of squabbling Democrats and Republicans, Washington governs according to limits prescribed by a fixed and narrow consensus. The two main parties collaborate in preserving that consensus. Doing so requires declaring out-of-...
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Friday, June 11, 2010 - 00:43
1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder
"We're gonna come out of this war rich!"
Yossarian
"You're gonna come out rich. We're gonna come out dead."
-From the Buck Henry screenplay of Catch 22
No one has captured the absurd spirit of US war-...
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Thursday, June 3, 2010 - 00:29
It’s like entering a minefield to seriously discuss Israel and Palestine, a tale of two peoples who claim the same land.
I’ve entered this minefield before and have been called an ”anti-semite” and an “Israel hater” for saying pretty much what the sentence above suggests, that...
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Wednesday, May 26, 2010 - 09:40
I’ve worked in journalism for 35 years. I did graduate study in journalism, I’ve worked as a daily newspaper reporter and I’ve freelanced magazine articles and newspaper op-eds. Now I blog.
I’ve learned that certain ideas are not permitted in the mainstream press. Well-paid gatekeepers...
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Thursday, May 20, 2010 - 08:07
In Spanish, the word honduras means depth. The example often used is meterse en honduras – to go beyond one’s depth. It comes from the adjective hondo – deep or low.
I’ve often wondered what the Spanish conquistador or priest was thinking when he decided circa...
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Thursday, May 13, 2010 - 00:59
Mister Obama’s War has hit a speed bump in Times Square. The question is will the President and members of Congress pay any attention to it and slow down, or will they floor the accelerator and race into Pakistan?
The speed bump is a nobody named Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old,...
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Friday, May 7, 2010 - 06:50
In the documentary film “The Most Dangerous Man In America,” Daniel Ellsberg tells about a fellow Rand Corporation war planner circa 1968 who described the US commitment to the war in Vietnam this way:
“We are 10 percent concerned about the Vietnamese; we are 20 percent concerned about...
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Saturday, May 1, 2010 - 03:41
John Grant is a writer/photographer living just outside Philadelphia’s city limits. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and has published both fiction and non-fiction.
Starting in the 1980s, he bummed around Central America and other places as a documentary...
