This story covers the growing online market for teenage amateur porn on the web:

Teenagers, often under the online tutelage of adults, are opening for-pay pornography sites featuring their own images sent onto the Internet by inexpensive Webcams.

And they perform from the privacy of home, while parents are nearby, beyond their children's closed bedroom doors.

The business has created youthful Internet porn stars — with nicknames like Riotboyy, Miss Honey and Gigglez — whose images are traded online long after their sites have vanished.

In this world, adolescents announce schedules of their next masturbation for customers who pay fees for the performance or monthly subscription charges.

Eager customers can even buy "private shows," in which teenagers sexually perform while following real-time instructions.

I think it shows a degree of entrepreneurial flair. So what? Who's exploiting whom here? The article comes from the NYT. So, naturally there is an overall disapproving, moralistic tone.   more »

Clearly, George Bush embraces the image of being a tough, strong and decisive leader. In his well choreographed speeches he often refers to himself as the ‘war president’ with a cocky smirk on his face and a glint in his eye.

He comfortably bandies about terms like ‘terrorists’ and ‘protecting the American people’ with reckless abandon. Evidently, Bush has come to believe this manufactured clap trap about himself. If only he were that man.

Like all things connected with the Bush regime, the reality of George Bush is the exact opposite of the image crafted by Karl Rove and his skillful handlers. George Bush has roughly the same mental capacity as the darling of the neocons, Ronald Reagan (when he was living).

Even his staunchest ally, Margaret Thatcher, said that Reagan didn’t “have much between the ears.” Ronald Reagan was the great prevaricator.

His presidency was a sham characterized by corruption and death. Like his pretend cowboy hero, George Bush is nothing more than an empty suit, as devoid of character, heart and conscience as was Ronald Reagan.

It is no accident that Bush was selected to serve the interests of empire. He is an ideal subject. Like Reagan, Bush is mere window dressing—the creation of public relations firms.   more »

Iraqi oil…will be a legitimate and a permanent target of the armed resistance plans to liberate Iraq and defeat the invaders...

The armed resistance will use every possible means militarily and technically to prevent the occupier from stealing Iraq’s oil and use its revenues with anyone, under any circumstances, on the national and international levels...

On this basis, every one who collaborates with the occupier, such as employees, merchants, middlemen, whether Iraqis, Arabs or non-Arabs will be watched and targeted without any hesitation. - Baath Arab Socialist Party Communiqué

THE GUERRILLA WAR ON IRAQI OIL

A war is raging in Iraq that will determine the outcome of the present occupation as well as the shape of future conflicts. It is the war for control of Iraqi oil.

Currently, America is losing the conflict in stunning fashion with little hope for change in the near future.   more »

The real cost to the US of the Iraq war is likely to be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion (£1.1 trillion), up to 10 times more than previously thought, according to a report written by a Nobel prize-winning economist and a Harvard budget expert.

The study, which expanded on traditional estimates by including such costs as lifetime disability and healthcare for troops injured in the conflict as well as the impact on the American economy, concluded that the US government is continuing to underestimate the cost of the war.

The report came during one of the most deadly periods in Iraq since the invasion, with the US military yesterday revising upwards to 11 the number of its troops killed during a wave of insurgent attacks on Thursday.

More than 130 civilians were also killed when suicide bombers struck Shia pilgrims in Karbala and a police recruiting station in Ramadi.

The paper on the real cost of the war, written by Joseph Stiglitz, a Columbia University professor who won the Nobel prize for economics in 2001, and Linda Bilmes, a Harvard budget expert, is likely to add to the pressure on the White House on the war.   more »

A glance at websites and newspapers of many Iranian "left" groups residing outside the country, gives one little impression that Iran's neighboring country, Iraq, is in a state of war and occupation by the US Empire.

There seems to be little concern among Iran's traditional left about the United States' intentions to take over and control Middle East's oil resources.

The neoconservative "Project for the New American Century (PNAC)" signifies little (if anything) to many of Iran's left groups.

Some, even, under the pretext of fighting fundamentalist Islamists, indirectly cheer the American incursion into Afghanistan and Iraq. In reality, however, Iraq is a mirror reflecting the many flaws and shortcomings of the left in the Middle East.

Some in the Iranian left might be evasive on the issue of their silence about the US imperialism's crimes in the region, but the Iraqi left's direct collaboration with the Bush administration is undeniable.

As part of the Iraqi Governing Council, the Iraqi Communist Party (with the exception of the breakaway faction) and the Kurdish forces headed by Jalal Talebani and Masoud Barezani, collaborated with the US occupation forces.   more »

The controversy over "cooking the books" on Iraq intelligence to promote an aggressive war might make one think that Dick Cheney and his minions were somehow breaking new ground.

But the precedent for fabricating a threat to justify the use of military force was set by the high-ranking national security officials who brought us the Vietnam War more than four decades ago. The Vietnam hawks wrote the book on how to get around inconvenient intelligence analysis.

I'm not referring to the well-known fact that the second alleged attack on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin never happened.

The Vietnam-era equivalent of today's neocon cabal created a Communist threat to all of Southeast Asia out of whole cloth, because the intelligence analysis of the issue said the opposite of what they wanted.

The story of that first conspiracy to fake an external threat, which I discovered in writing a book on how and why the United States went to war over Vietnam, suggests that "cooking the books" is a fundamental characteristic of U.S. national security elites bent on war.

Just as the Bush war party believed it had to demonstrate a WMD threat from Iraq and links between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks to sell the invasion of Iraq, the top national security officials of the early 1960s felt the need to concoct a Communist threat to all of non-Communist Southeast Asia.   more »

7 JANUARY

"King Kong": A Deeply Reactionary, Racist Movie

BushCon: The Corporation Running America

America's Poor: 'Let Them Eat Shit"

Robert Fisk: Sharon's Slaughter of the Innocents

The American Class System: A Tale of Two Cultures

Iraq War Vet "Marlboro Man" Suffers from PTSD

Bush's Battle with the Truth

Pouring Acid Over the Mainstream Media & Their Spouting Pundits