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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Continue reading "Band Of Rebels" »

Come join the winner of the 2009 Nobel “Iron Chef” Prize on a culinary review of three years of the Hope’n’Change Administration. Bon Appetit!

11×17 inch full-bleed medium-res color .jpg images:
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Outside spread, 664kb

Assembly instructions:
1. Print two-sided on 11×17 “full-bleed” color printer.
2. Fold in thirds so that the panel with the old Metro car and the title “Chef Barack’s Famous Democratic Diner” shows as the front cover.
3. Et voila!

Continue reading "Chef Barack’s Democratic Diner" »

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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Continue reading "Like Generations Before…" »

So, apparently, Obama gave a speech the other day about Afghanistan. Mind you, I haven’t watched a single Obama speech ever since the ’04 Democratic Convention keynote and the Inauguration. That was pretty much all I could stand; since then, about all I could handle was the occasional video clip on TV, or the transcripts posted on the Web. From all accounts, it was classic Obama, a rehash of the Iraq “withdrawal” announcement: out of all the clips and reports I saw, two “money quotes” really stuck in my craw, and one of them was that “the tide of war is receding” — and just in time for next year’s election. Who’da thunk it?

It’s reported that our Boy Emperor is bringing home the troops he sent when he first escalated the slaughter in Afghanistan, leaving 70,000 still there, plus leaving himself an out — of course! — allowing him to stick around if things aren’t working out for the Empire. All told, this “withdrawal” means a continuation of the war until at least 2014 — conveniently, a year into the incoming GOP administration, at which point the Liberals and Progressives will have miraculously rediscovered their anti-war voices and be cynically filling the streets again.

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Continue reading "The Tide of War" »