Here’s a fun game you can play while reading or watching the “news”: every time you see a report from Libya and hear the phrase “Libyan rebels”, insert the phrase “supported by US and NATO airstrikes” after it, to get a more accurate picture of what’s going on.

Then, when you get bored with that, ask yourself this question: why is the US so gung-ho to intervene in Libya while totally ignoring an equally vicious and horrific regime in Syria? Here’s a hint: it’s got three letters, it’s black and goopy, and there’s a whole goddamn’ lot of it under the ground in Libya… and it sure as hell isn’t freedom.

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Whenever political dissidents anywhere are disappeared, imprisoned, tortured or murdered, it affects me personally — but nothing has affected me quite as personally as the kidnapping and torture of Ali Ferzat, well-known Syrian cartoonist, by agents of the Syrian regime. This cartoon is in solidarity with Ferzat, standing with all of my comrades at Cartoon Movement and with artists around the world who put themselves on the line to speak truth and challenge authoritarian rule. (Pictured at left: Ali Ferzat recuperates in a Damascus hospital; foto via CNN)

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Yeah, uh huh… like in Vietnam. And Nicaragua. And Iraq.

This was my other favorite quote from Obama’s Afghanistan speech, a crass naked appeal to American conceit. Matthew Rothschild writes in The Progressive:

Our war president promised more war. While he trumpeted his big Afghanistan speech as the first step in ending that war, Barack Obama essentially told the American people that tens of thousands of our soldiers would still be fighting there for at least three more years.

A year from now, Obama said all the additional “surge” troops will be back home. But the U.S. will still have close to 70,000 troops in Afghanistan, twice the number that were there when Obama took office.

Only “by 2014,” he said, will the Afghan people “be responsible for their own security.”

And even then, Obama appears to have left himself an out. “We’ll have to do the hard work of keeping the gains that we made,” he said. But what if those “gains” aren’t kept? Would he reverse course and keep more troops there…?

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Well, here’s a shred of good news from the Arab Revolution front: after a week’s worth of hell-raising, the Bahrain Grand Prix organizers have backed off and cancelled the race. Interviewed on Al Jazeera, Bahrain International Circuit Chairman Zayed “Stability” Alzayani was spinning furiously, hemming and hawing about a positive and constructive role in Formula One, assiduously avoiding any mention of the bloody suppression of the peoples’ uprisings in Bahrain, choosing to focus on the logistical issues posed by a postponement of the race. Hey, Zayed, if that’s your story and you’re sticking to it, that’s cool, we can work with that.

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Continue reading "Death Race 2011: The Sequel" »