I wanted to call them Christians with a capital H, but they’re not hypocritical per se. American evangelicals do not profess to do good, merely they pledge to do good by Jesus Christ. Meaning, what their preacher tells them, that the scripture tells them, that Jesus tells them to do. Go spread my faith, in a nutshell.

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An insurgency in its last throes? Even to call Iraqi weapons improvised, as in IEDs, is to lie about the strength of the Iraqi insurgency -or as some would say- resistance. These “Improvised Explosive Devices,” are not so improvised at all. And they’ve been responsible for the high US casualty rate for over a year now. Read more »

Try this on for size: the war on terror is being used to justify all forms of restrictive government controls, from surveillance to union-busting to torture. Lacking any terrorist acts of late, how do we know there are even terrorists? Except that our government keeps scooping them up, putting them in Guantanamo, but it won’t let us see them.

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You can judge a book by its cover if the book’s edible and the judgement has to do with how it tastes.

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Here are some wonderful video clips, if you haven’t seen them already:
 
1. Georgia congressman Lynn Westmoreland wants to post the Ten Commandments in the halls of congress, if only to be reminded of them himself. Here he is in an interview with Stephen Colbert.

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Dweebs? Opportunist? Cretins? Inane Fausts, right-wing mini-minds, criminals.

An urban untruth we can stop lying to ourself about would be recycling. Right now we can chose to separate our refuse in hope that we will be contributing less to the local landfill. From the regular garbage, we pull paper, plastic and aluminum and place them in separate containers.

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Urban myths are stories too amazing to be disbelieved. Here’s a sub-urban myth which we want so much to believe. The myth of sharing our neighborhoods with their original animal inhabitants.

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US troops are training Iraqis to be soldiers? Is that a laugh? Iraqi soldiers are already some of the most experienced in the world, many of them veterans of the ten year war with Iran and the Gulf War.
 
Iraqi fighters have shown their mettle against the overwhelming superiority of their American occupiers, twice. What do soft bellied Americans have to teach to seasoned Iraqis?

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US mainstream media reports that Hamas has decided to end its cease-fire on account of a recent Israeli gun-boat attack upon Palestinian beach-goers. This follows a day after a top Palestinian government official was assassinated by an Israeli air strike.
 
Who might it be said was breaking the cease-fire?

US military press liasons have decided to claim some headway in Iraq by discontinuing the Abu Musab al ZarqawiTM character.
 
The world first heard of al-Zarqawi when Nicholas Berg was beheaded in a widely circulated video which coincided with the emergence of the Abu Ghraib photos. Although the video appeared to conceal western soldiers disguised as hooded Islamic militants, US spokesmen insisted the principle sword-bearer among them was “Zarqawi,” head of al Qaeda In Iraq. To this day, most Iraqis do not believe there was any AQII, nor that it might be lead by any “Zarqawi,” unless of course it exists as an American fabrication.

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What are you if you do not know the bad you are doing, or justify it because the best you can do right now is follow orders? Are you guilty of bank robbery if you only drove the getaway car?
 
Did you murder the children in Haditha if you merely delivered the mail to the person who serves the food to the person who shuffled the paperwork for the person who maintained the landing gear of the plane which flew the Bradley Armored Vehicle which carried the soldiers to Haditha to execute the women, children and fathers in the head at point blank range?

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This week 1,500 Army reservists from the 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division are being ordered from Kuwait to join the embattled Marines in Iraq’s Anbar province. Their commander General Casey assured us this deployment will be short-term. “Definitely short-term” he reiterated.
 
With casualty rates so high, is the general’s confidence based on the soldier’s probable life expectancy?

I’ve read it several times now, the eight-hundred pound gorilla in the room. This would seem to confuse 1) the proverbial 600-900 lb primate (gorillas not named Kong seldom excede 400 lbs) who outclasses everyone else in size and power, for 2) the pachyderm in the room whose relative mass overwhelms our capacity to ignore it, though we try.
 
In this corporate age of Darwinian monopolies, maybe the de facto brutality of alpha-male corporate monopoly has become something the corporate media mouthpieces won’t let us talk about. There’s an elephant in the room, and the three hundred pound gorilla won’t let us talk about it.
 
The gorilla is the elephant is the new metaphor for the GOP.