The FCC has outlawed the single most essential word in political discourse and protest: bullshit.

This is not only an absurd misinterpretation of our community standards and another perilous attack on our First Amendment, I also believe it is a violation of our civil rights worthy of court challenge. Get me to a lawyer, I think we now have the basis for a citizens’ suit.

In its latest batch of nannyisms, the FCC declared shit and all its variants, including bullshit, not merely indecent — which is where the case law stood after the Supreme Court washed the seven dirty words out of George Carlin’s mouth in 1978 — but also now profane.

Since outmoded broadcast censorship legislation was passed in 1927 — giving the government this constitutionally dubious authority — the FCC had not once found any word to be profane until 2004, when it ruled against Bono’s joyful utterance of “fucking” at the Golden Globes.

Now “shit” et al join this devil’s dictionary. And the FCC warns that they are not merely profane but “presumptively profane,” which means that except in “rare” and “unusual circumstances,” to speak these words on the air will guarantee you a penalty.   more »

LOVING TO HATE HILLARY

In order to understand what's going on with Hillary Clinton, it helps to recall a woman who lost her head and therefore her life in 1793: Marie Antoinette.

She is probably best remembered as the spoiled princess-cum-queen who said, "Let them eat cake" -- a remark (the "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" of its day) that would have shown how callous and out of touch she was, if she had ever said it. She did not.

In her own time, though, it was not merely what she supposedly said that defamed her and made her so unpopular, it was also her alleged behavior.

She was manufactured into an Austrian-born slut who, as Stefan Zweig put it in his classic biography, was (falsely) "guilty of every crime, every form of moral corruption, every perversion."

It was necessary to have someone like her to embody the greed and corruption of the upper classes. It was necessary, in fact, to have a woman because male sexuality is, let's face it, not all that interesting.   more »

While the media devoted huge amounts of coverage to the elections in Israel, with liberal commentators celebrating the power of Kadima as the new force for positive change...

With everyone falling over themselves to agree on the wonderful harmony of Israeli public opinion in unilaterally setting the country's borders on Palestinian land...

And with an uncontested acceptance by the media of this pretty unique approach to negotiations, international law, military conquest and the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force, Palestinians have had a different sort of week.

The mills ran out of flour in Gaza. A place that is continually extolled as "free" (as a result of the "Israeli pull-out" last year), and a triumph of this same Israeli unilateralism that we are about to see much more of, the Israeli military had actually locked up Gaza so tight that no trickle of humanitarian relief could get through.

Impoverished and demolished by 38 years of brutal military occupation, Palestinians were now being told they could starve.   more »

Is the layoff the great American wound? In Louis Uchitelle's account, it seems a wound in triplicate.

It hollows out companies so they can't compete. It hollows out the country by removing middle-class jobs.

It hollows out the middle-class employees who are laid off and then too often drop permanently to a demeaning, low-wage way of life.

To Mr. Uchitelle, who reports on economics for The New York Times, corporate America's addiction to the layoff has gone past the point of economic rationality.

In this fascinating book he tries to tell the history of the United States in our time as the unchecked rise of layoffs.   more »

Michael Meacher, the former environment minister, put down a marker for the left for a challenge against Mr Brown when the Prime Minister steps down.

In a pamphlet published by the Catalyst think-tank, he called for the minimum wage to be increased gradually to £7.40; the private market in health, education and housing to be scrapped and returned to public services; less subservience to the White House; and a radical approach to climate change.

"This is designed as a manifesto for the left," Mr Meacher said. "I think there should be a contest when Blair steps down or is forced out."

WHEN WILL BLAIR GO?

Tony Blair is under mounting pressure to spell out his timetable for his departure as Prime Minister, amid growing speculation about his future.

The febrile atmosphere at Westminster was fuelled when a cabinet minister's aide urged Mr Blair to hand over to Gordon Brown rapidly.   more »

Let's compare the decisions to tighten our immigration laws with the "Iraq war," which will ultimately cost us in excess of a trillion dollars, the right wing idiots and their spineless Democrat compadres have foisted upon us in Iraq.

We haven't done a single damned useful thing there. Oil production and electricity generation is down. Freedoms have decreased. Fear has increased. Atrocities have become everyday.

I mention the war because the costs could have paid for job training, re-education of displaced workers, paid for universal health care for all and so much more.

We could have invested that money to produce tax-paying workers contributing to our nation. But instead, some knee-jerk right wing xenophobes rode their surge of adrenalin like a tidal wave.

The congressional democrats had the same information I had and millions of protestors had. They could have seen through the lies. They chose to vote for a war because they thought it would save their cowardly political asses.

Now we have a "situation" where there about 12 million "illegal" workers in the US. They're illegal because they slipped in to the US through its pathetically porous borders.   more »

The great mystery of how and why we got ourselves bogged down in this quagmire is going to provide scholars, and quite possibly the law enforcement community, with enough to do for quite some time.

There are two ways to look at this question: if we accept the official version, then our invasion of Iraq based on the "certainty" that Saddam possessed WMD, and otherwise represented a direct threat to us and to his neighbors, was the consequence of a massive failure in our intelligence-gathering and evaluation procedures.

And of course we couldn't have known that the invasion, conquest, and military occupation of the country would spark a persistent guerrilla resistance – could we?

After all, it's not like anybody in the top echelons of military intelligence and policymaking circles knows any history, and as for having common sense – well, let's not go there.

The other, unofficial, version – and the one I wholeheartedly endorse – is this: the U.S. knew perfectly well what it was doing when it charged into Iraq, guns blazing.

They knew the Sunnis and Shi'ites would soon be at each other's throats, they anticipated the insurgency and the depth of Iranian influence in post-war Iraq, and their attitude toward all this was expressed by none other than the president, albeit inadvertently, when he infamously bellowed: "Bring it on!"   more »

30 MARCH

Pass the Spliff: Stoners, Slackers and Anti-Capitalists

How Come Bush Was Able to Fool Most of the People All of the Time?

The New French Revolution

Fanning the Flames: America's Fear of Foreigners

Israel's Brutal Apartheid System

Growing Number of Iraq Vets Campaign Against the War

Blair Sets Up the "Endless War" Scenario

America's Imperial Overreach and Global Decline