Increasingly desperate over the deteriorating situation in Iraq, the Bush administration is demanding that the US-installed government in Baghdad support a savage intensification of repression or give way to a dictatorial regime that will.

This is the significance of a series of reports—based largely on comments made by unnamed US officials—that have appeared in the press in recent days.

On Wednesday, the New York Times published a front-page lead that had all the earmarks of a story planted with the aim of preparing US public opinion for a coup in Baghdad.

“Senior Iraqi and American officials are beginning to question whether Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has the political muscle and decisiveness to hold Iraq together as it hovers on the edge of a full civil war,” the Times declared.   more »

After skewering Bush as “the devil” and sniffing around for sulfur (the traditional sign of Lucifer) Chavez performed his ablutions with a sign of the cross and an angelic expression worthy of Botticelli.

If you’re a lefty, it just doesn’t get any better than this.

Chavez should give lessons in public speaking. His appearance was like a clap of thunder; waving Chomsky with one hand and pummeling Bush with the other.

He managed to heap more muck on “Guantanamo Nation” than anyone since Harold Pinter gave his blistering Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on 12-7-05. That’s when Pinter said:

“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have ever talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised quite a clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It is a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”   more »

Think of it this way.

You are a former cold warrior who spent your youth studying every aspect of the old Soviet Union. Even though you hated their policies publicly, you began privately, first grudgingly and then, with time, enthusiastically, to admire the way they operated.

They were so organized and adept at imposing their agenda with top –down control. They were, in words used at the time, ‘masters of deception” and pursued secretive strategies of infiltrating ideologues and mole-like operatives ---known as apparatchiks—into government agencies and military organs.

Their KGB danced circles around our CIA and when their often-innocent “suspects” were interrogated, they were tortured with no restraints.

The KGB made sure of that. Now the CIA does our dirty work and the President is crusading to lift any and all restraints from their extreme electrode units.

They killed their anti-communist “enemies” outright after convicting them in kangaroo courts. We just detain ours indefinitely while demonizing them as terrorists beyond the protection of the law.   more »

The former Republican strategist-turned-critic Kevin Phillips once called the Democrats the “world’s second-most enthusiastic capitalist party” because of the zeal of the so-called “party of working people” for promoting business-friendly policies.

The same could be said about the Democrats’ support for U.S. imperialism. But “second-most” might be an understatement.

With the campaign for the 2006 congressional elections heating up, the Democrats are determined not to be painted by Republicans as “soft on national security.”

On the contrary, the Democrats’ criticism of one front in the Bush administration “war on terror”--Iraq--is now almost wholly limited to the idea that it distracts from the other “real” fronts, like Iran, Afghanistan and even North Korea.   more »

There are two reasons why flying dwarfs any other environmental impact a single person can exert. The first is the distance it permits us to cover.

According to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, the carbon emissions per passenger mile "for a fully loaded cruising airliner are comparable to a passenger car carrying three or four people".

In other words, they are about half those, per person, of a car containing the average loading of 1.56 people. But while the mean distance travelled by car in the UK is 9,200 miles per year, in a plane we can beat that in one day.

On a return flight from London to New York, every passenger produces roughly 1.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide: the very quantity we will each be entitled to emit in a year once the necessary cut in emissions has been made.   more »