So, a few mornings ago, I emerged from my REM fog to NBC video of Palestinian and Lebanese villages being crushed by tanks and missiles and F-16s and the sound of Matt Lauer yammering about Israel’s “right to defend itself”.

Who knows, maybe it was just the hour of the morning, or perhaps I was really and truly revulsed by Israel claiming a right to “defend itself” — by using tanks, missiles, and F-16s against already beaten-down, occupied territories in a country that’s got no imperialist power backing them up, got no tanks, got no Patriot missiles, got no F-16s, got no nukes — not to mention having no food, no water, no medicine, no services…

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Did anyone else here see those Liberals at the April 29th New York City peace mobe toting signs sponsored by Working Assets reading “Out Of Iraq, Into Darfur”? Yeah, it sounded pretty damn’ whacked to me, too.

I mean, c’mon…can you believe that Amnesty International is supporting military intervention in Darfur? Yeah, that sounds even more whacked than a rally of 10,000 Liberals on the Mall a couple of weeks ago yelling for President Chimp to invade… uh, that is, “save” Darfur. Y’know, through the past decade and a half at least, I haven’t seen a single “humanitarian” crisis — real or perceived — that the US State hasn’t tried to exploit for either resource extraction or imperial expansion: Somalia, Kosovo, the Sudan, you name it. If anything about Darfur is “saved”, it’s going to be the big-assed puddle of oil sitting underneath Sudanese soil.

Imperialism and militarism aren’t tools for solving problems — they are the problems. Even the quickest examination of US foreign policy and behavior over the past fifteen years would show you why “Out Of Iraq, Into Darfur” is about the most cockamamie idea to come along since “Anybody But Bush”.

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Hillary, Hillary, Hillary! What could I possibly say about Hillary Clinton that hasn’t already been said about the sensation of having red-hot steel needles plunged into your eyeballs? Those bugged-out eyeballs, that phony horse-toothed smile, that hectoring schoolmarmish speaking style, those posh outfits, that insufferable sense of entitlement that oozes out of her every pore and orifice — there’s just nothing about Hillary that doesn’t inspire a good, healthy, deep-down hatred inside of me.

I’m almost at the point of actually hoping that they do nominate Hillary just for the entertainment value of watching the Democratic Party crater good and hard, one last time, for good — I’ve got the beer in the cooler, the Jiffy-Pop on the stove and the lounge chairs set up and ready for the big Fail — so that folks who want real change can sweep aside the wreckage to make room for a real “peoples’ party”.

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Almost as if on cue, USA Today, in its classic “everything’s OK, don’t worry, be happy, nothing to see here” fashion, ran a big-ass front-page story this week trumpeting in its headline that the economy was “surging”. Now, if you know anything at all about USA Today — or, as some of us wags call it, USA Hooray — when you see them using words like “surging” in a headline on an economic news story, you can be sure it’s 99 & 44/100% pure bullshit.

But, anyway, assuming you believe USA Today, the economy’s surging again! And, if you checked out the actual breakdown yourself at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you’d see that a pretty good chunk of them are rock-bottom-wage “service” jobs, not including the handful of “freelance” categories you see here — including a newly-emerging job category showing a huge upswing at the end of the month, shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and the Gulf Coasts of Mississippi and Alabama.

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