Imagine if Al Qaeda had resolved to attack us not with conventional chemical weapons but by slipping large amounts of high-fructose corn syrup into our food supply. That would finally rouse us to action — but in fact it's pretty much what we're doing to ourselves...

I know all this sounds banal. Perhaps I should be using this journalistic real estate to thunder about grand issues like the Iraq war or Middle East peace or corruption in Congress.

But remember that fat kills far more Americans than terrorists. Indeed, The New England Journal of Medicine reported last year that because of rising obesity, life expectancy in the U.S. might soon stop rising and could drop.

So if our government wants to keep our children safe, it doesn't just have to go after terrorists in Afghanistan. It also has to go after Twinkies at home.

In 2003, Mike Huckabee, the governor of Arkansas, learned he had type 2 diabetes.

His doctor told him he would probably be dead in 10 years — and that terrified him enough to start exercising, eschew sugar and lose about 110 pounds (at 5 feet 11 inches, he's now 180 pounds). His first attempts at jogging left him dizzy after a few hundred yards, but now he is running marathons.   more »

European Jewry of all disparate nationalities converged upon British Mandate Palestine, bought and settled parcels of land, achieved diplomatic successes leading to the U.N. partition of the land (which the Arabs made clear over and over would not be acceptable).

Then secured their part of the land and more while reducing the non-Jewish population within this territory by about 750,000 people, destroyed some 300 plus villages making it impossible for these people to return.

Refused to accept responsibility for the consequences of this colonial enterprise and let it be known to all that, in fact, it was really the Arabs fault and why don’t they just take these people in.

So for decades now, the Palestinians have been dispossessed (and the details about this will get richer in subsequent posts) but they did establish a political structure of their own and lo and behold, this structure used the tactic of violence to try and achieve political aims.

How this tactic is and has been interpreted (terrorism, resistance, emancipation), however, takes us back to how the interpreter answers the questions with which I began this post.

So then, what of this violence? Has Palestinian resistance accomplished much of a political nature? That is, has the violence served a rational end – Palestinian self determination – whether successfully or not and should we consider such violence in that light rather than as the actions of fanatics?   more »

Extraordinary allegations that Special Branch officers deliberately falsified vital evidence to hide mistakes which led to the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes at a south London Underground station were made last night.

According to claims in the News of the World, police altered the contents of a logbook, which detailed the Brazilian electrician's final movements, in a bid to cover up their blunders.

The 27-year-old was shot dead at Stockwell Tube station, in the wake of the London bombings, by police exercising a shoot-to-kill policy.

Specific words were understood to have been changed to cover up the fact that surveillance officers had wrongly identified Mr de Menezes as terror suspect Hussein Osman.

Alterations were hastily made to amend the wording of the official log once the shocking truth emerged that the dead man was not, in fact, the extremist wanted in connection with the failed 21 July Tube bombings.

This was in a bid to pass the blame for the shooting on to the firearms officers who actually shot the electrician and on to senior officers at Scotland Yard who were in charge of the operation.   more »

Oh no, not more democracy again! Didn't we award this to those Algerians in 1990? And didn't they reward us with that nice gift of an Islamist government - and then they so benevolently cancelled the second round of elections? Thank goodness for that!

True, the Afghans elected a round of representatives, albeit that they included some warlords and murderers. But then the Iraqis last year elected the Dawa party to power in Baghdad, which was responsible - let us not speak this in Washington - for most of the kidnappings of Westerners in Beirut in the 1980s, the car bombing of the (late) Emir and the US and French embassies in Kuwait.

And now, horror of horrors, the Palestinians have elected the wrong party to power. They were supposed to have given their support to the friendly, pro-Western, corrupt, absolutely pro-American Fatah, which had promised to "control" them, rather than to Hamas, which said they would represent them. And, bingo, they have chosen the wrong party again.

Result: 76 out of 132 seats. That just about does it. God damn that democracy. What are we to do with people who don't vote the way they should?   more »

Saddam Hussein's trial quickly collapsed into chaos after resuming Sunday with one defendant dragged out of court and the defense team walking out in protest. The former Iraqi leader was then ejected after shouting "down with traitors" and "down with America."

The new chief judge in the trial, Raouf Abdel-Rahman, sought to show tough control over the court. He was brought in a shake-up sparked when his predecessor resigned this month after complaints that he was not doing enough to rein in Saddam's frequent courtroom outbursts.

But the stormy session Sunday -- the first in a month -- will likely increase doubts over the trial's fairness, already raised by the shake-up that brought in Abdel-Rahman.

After a defense lawyer was removed, the entire defense team left in protest as the judge shouted after them, ''Any lawyer who walks out will not be allowed back into this courtroom.''

Abdel-Rahman appointed four new defense lawyers. But two other defendants, Taha Yassin Ramadan and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, said they opposed the appointment and demanded to leave. They were escorted out.   more »

A bit over a week ago, President Bush and his men promised to provide the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years.

Instead, we got the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation, contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to paint dissidents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big, dangerous lies.

The first was that the domestic spying program is carefully aimed only at people who are actively working with Al Qaeda, when actually it has violated the rights of countless innocent Americans.

And the second was that the Bush team could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if only they had thought of eavesdropping without a warrant.

Sept. 11 could have been prevented

This is breathtakingly cynical. The nation's guardians did not miss the 9/11 plot because it takes a few hours to get a warrant to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mail messages. They missed the plot because they were not looking.   more »

Karl Marx famously dismissed religion as “Opium for the masses.” In the Middle East it is more like amphetamines. It keeps people going past the end of exhaustion and despair.

Both the White House and the Democrats -- “progressive” such as Barrack Obama and regressive like Clinton and Lieberman -- are parroting Israel like a second grade pupil reading from My Pet Goat.

Elections results in the Occupied Territories show that Fatah has lost its majority in the Palestinian parliament by a stunningly large margin.

This is a transformational event with lasting geopolitical importance, for Hamas and Fatah, for Palestinians and Israelis, and for the world.

Mahmoud Abbas, leader of Fatah and head of the make-believe Palestinian “government”, was never an inspiring figure. Palestine today is still at a stage that requires a liberation movement.

Yet Abbas, even more than Arafat before him, bought into the Western conceit that he was a head of state in the making. Rather than leading the struggle for liberation, Abbas focused on being a technocrat to satisfy the rhetorical needs of the EU and the US who funded him.   more »

27 JANUARY

"Bushie: My Pet President": New Children's Book Runaway Success

The "Pornification" of Culture

Israel Is in No State to Exist

Paul Krugman Edges Towards "Socialized Health Care"

Overthrowing Capitalism: It's Not Impossible

How 'Left' Is Al Gore? Darling of the Progressives

Hamas Victory: US/Israel Stoke Up the Hate

"Blowback Moment": Western Imperialism Pays the Price of Greed