We're proud to bring you an exclusive extract from "Bushie: My Pet President"

> IN THE OVAL OFFICE
You are standing inside a White House, having just been elected to the presidency of the United States. You knew Scalia would pull through for you.

There is a large desk here, along with a few chairs and couches. The presidential seal is in the middle of the room and there is a full-length mirror upon the wall.

What do you want to do now?

> INVADE IRAQ
You are not able to do that, yet.

> LOOK IN MIRROR
Self-reflection is not your strong suit.   more »

Levy documents the 'pornification' of our culture and investigates women's collusion in it. She joins the crew of cult TV-show Girls Gone Wild, in which women are recruited in bars and on beaches and asked to flash for the camera.

They find this so exhilarating, Levy is told, that the programme's creator has likened the flashing girls to feminists burning their bras.

She goes to high-end porn parties for liberated working women, at which troupes of girls in satin panties and thigh-high boots shimmy on a stage. The (female) organisers claim to be showing 'feminism in action'.

She interviews recent graduates and high-powered executives; she finds strippers hired for teenage girls' birthday parties, and a new fashion for 'top surgery' (double mastectomies) among gay women.

Women, it seems, either want to be 'like men', in the most limited definition possible, or they want to be like the siliconised women they think appeal to men.   more »

It must be remembered that "Israel" is no more than a region of Palestine, which was annexed by the colonial powers almost 60 years ago and handed over to Jews. "Israel" is no more a nation than "The Gaza Strip", or "The West Bank". These are territories within "Greater Palestine". [Ed Strong]

The instant US demand that Hamas "recognize Israel" is like rewinding the clock twenty-five years to when this same demand was the pretext to ignore and exclude the PLO from peace negotiations.

But as Hamas has observed, all the PLO's submission to these demands did not lead to any loosening of Israel's grip or any lessening of US support for Israel.

Hamas is unlikely to do as the US demands, and even if it did, it would probably only give rise to new resistance groups responding to the worsening conditions on the ground generated by the occupation.   more »

A viable and desirable strategy for transcending capitalism will certainly include leaving capitalism behind. Capitalism is despicable.

It will also include, however, attaining something worthwhile in capitalism's place. What we win must be desirable.

Leaving capitalism behind will entail in each country arousing a large portion of the population to struggle.

Winning something worthwhile in capitalism's place will entail that the large portion of the population seeking change are all equal and active participants, defining what they are seeking and their methods. Something desirable is not imposed from above, but is created from below.

To gain sufficient support to win a new economy will involve, therefore, many battles for better conditions, better circumstances, more income and more say for those who are worst off.

More, all these battles will have to be fought in ways that lead to ever enlarging further struggle for still more gains, rather than in ways that assume that capitalism will last forever and that cause people to settle for less than revolution as the end goal.   more »

Gore refused to characterize the material interests and motives which impel the Bush administration’s power-grab, referring only to “mistakes” and actions which were “misguided.” He criticized the decision to invade Iraq, but never mentioned the word “oil.”

The previous week, Bush gave a particularly vicious speech attacking opponents of the Iraq war in which he declared that criticism of the war was permissible only so long as charges of a “war for oil” were excluded from the debate. Despite the harshness of his criticism of Bush January 16, Gore tacitly accepted this restriction.

In a similar vein, Gore avoided any examination of the social conditions within the United States—above all, the enormous growth of social inequality—which is the underlying motor force of the Bush administration’s attacks on democratic rights.

It is impossible to maintain democratic forms in a society so sharply polarized between enormous wealth in the hands of a tiny elite—less than one percent of the population—and the vast majority struggling for their economic survival.

As a bourgeois politician who defends the profit system that is responsible for this vast social polarization, Gore is incapable of raising this central issue.

Instead, he sought to make an appeal to a section of the ultra-right, warning that an all-powerful Bush administration might be succeeded by a Democratic president who would exercise similarly sweeping powers.   more »

The U.S. and European nations declared yesterday that Hamas could not form a legitimate government unless it drops its demand to destroy Israel and renounces violence.

"If your platform is the destruction of Israel, it means you're not a partner in peace, and we're interested in peace," President Bush said.

Similar statements came from other parts of the world. European parliament members spoke of the possibility that donors would cut off vital aid, putting Hamas under extreme pressure to moderate its hardline positions.

The U.S. consul in Jerusalem, Jacob Walles, said Friday it was too early to discuss the possibility.

Israel's acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert, quickly ruled out talks: "The state of Israel will not negotiate with a Palestinian administration if even part of it is an armed terrorist organization calling for the destruction of the state of Israel," Olmert said in a statement.

Hamas ideology does not recognize the presence of a Jewish state in an Islamic Middle East. In recent years, however, some Hamas leaders have grudgingly accepted the idea of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, as long as it is understood to be only a stage toward freeing all of Palestine - including Israel.   more »

WESTERN IMPERIALISM, THE MIDDLE EAST & BLACK GOLD

The story of Iraq and its people since 1991 is one of immense tragedy, of a fate cruel and evil that has befallen innocent human beings whose only crime has been living inside what was once the ancient land of Mesopotamia.

It is ironic that the land that first gave rise to human civilization has been made to suffer tremendous hardship in the last fifteen years, severely decimated and destroyed, its wounds hemorrhaging from incessant human cruelty.

The heart of the Fertile Crescent has become a barren wasteland, its waters, the Tigris and Euphrates, those veins of sustenance for our ancient forefathers, transformed into rivers of waste and pollution and decaying death, their fertility now mutated into toxicity.

Its cities and peoples, descendants of a civilization thousands of years old, rich in both culture and history, have been made to suffer the severe consequences of sitting atop modern humanity’s most coveted natural resource.

A black gold sought by nations and corporations of the rich and powerful north, a devil’s excrement that fuels economies and human greed, feeding apathy and wickedness, corruption and colonialism, and, as always, expanding comfort and excessiveness in the lands of the pillagers.   more »

26 JANUARY

The Madness of Banning Abortion

Bob Herbert Nails Bush to the Cross

Hamas Victory: Birth of a Nation

Bush Regime: When in Trouble, Play the Patriot Game

Stunning Victory for Hamas: The Islamic Revolution Reaches Israel's Border

Bush Proves God Is Dead

George Galloway: Radical Politician or Buffoon?

Demonizing Ahmadinejad: Jewish Cabal Foam at the Mouth