Sometimes funny news feels more honest than the serious stuff, the ironic take closer to the truth than the supposedly "objective" one. And we all need a little relief.

But like comfort food consumed night after night in place of broccoli, we are gorging ourselves on what feels good instead of processing what feels so bad - and doing something about it.

Satire has a long and proven history as a source of bona fide social change. But does the one-millionth joke about President George W. Bush's preschool perception of global geography really regain the trust of the international community?

The difference between a satire such as George Orwell's "Animal Farm" and "The Daily Show" is that the latter too often makes us comfortable, even happy, as opposed to the motivating and sometimes terrifying disequilibrium caused by that novel's satirizing totalitarianism   more »

All along I’ve been amused by the Barack Obama spectacle. The very idea of a half-white Hawai’i multi-millionaire passing himself off as a black man from Chicago seems more sitcom than Senate plot.

The all-Celebrity/all-the-time press swooning over the rookie senator’s announcement that he is in the presidential running has seemed to me to be just the latest flavor-of-the-month distraction, merely using Obama’s considerable vanity to keep restless Democrats on the Reservation; with Obama to be swiftly benched once the starting team is anointed.

Oh, I guarantee the stated reason will be his “lack of foreign policy experience,” though that was obviously never an issue with Bubba, Shrub or any of the other non-Senators who have won every presidential election since JFK.

But, since Obama is now riding high, I’ve been looking into various progressive analyses of him. As usual, Counterpunchers lead the pack. Alexander Cockburn’s “Senator Slither” insights have been prescient and will be proven so on a large scale (pun intended) soon enough.   more »

The coin finally dropped. Stealthily, but we heard it loud and clear.

It dropped while we were busy scratching our heads trying to figure out what plan America's current great leader, the eminent George W. Bush, has for Iraq, what truths were buried with Iraq's former great leader, the late eminent Saddam Hussain, how bloody Iraq's civil war will become.

This, after busily listening to tales of WMD's [was that Words of Mass Deception?], the lies "we are not there for Iraq's oil", the sham of Iraq's election process and the billions gone missing under the watchful eyes of the occupying powers.

The oil truth is now unfolding. Everything else was a charade for America as it quietly drafted Iraq's new oil law to enrich further Bush's and Cheney's oil buddies for the next 30 years.   more »

When we examine the subject of ethnic cleansing in Palestine, we take into account its various dimensions, one being the accompanying racist discourse, which has become part and parcel of Israel's ethnic cleansing policies.

Any act of collective punishment -- whether ethnic cleansing or genocide -- is often preceded and adjoined by a racist discourse that dehumanises the victim and justifies the crime on baseless grounds, a concoction of lies and fabrications that may appeal to national or religious psyches, but fails any test of law, morality or basic human norms.

Without such discourse -- in which the Zionists movement depicted the original inhabitants of Palestine as cancerous, subhuman and a nuisance in the face of civilisation and progress -- it would not have been possible to carry out a systematic campaign of murder and ethnic cleansing in 1947- 48.

This inhumanity saw the killing of an estimated 13,000 Palestinians, the forcible eviction of 850,000 and the depopulation and subsequent destruction of nearly 500 villages and localities.   more »

Hain was barely five minutes into his pitch for Labour's deputy leadership when he let rip.

"The neo-con mission has failed." No caveats about Tony Blair's friend from across the sea. "It's not only failed to provide a coherent international policy, it's failed wherever it's been tried, and it's failed with the American electorate, who kicked it into touch last November.

"So if neo-con unilateralism has damaged the fight against global terrorism and taken the world's eyes off the ball of solving the Middle East conflict, for example, we've got to really get back on that agenda."

Hain served as a minister in the Foreign Office under the late Robin Cook, who pledged to introduce an ethical dimension to Britain's global dealings.   more »

Colombo, Sri Lanka - A visit to the supermarket in my locality always ends up with a big bill. Every time, I pay the bill, I make a resolution that I am not going to visit the supermarket unless it is very essential. But within a week, I am there again.

I have become a captive to a supermarket culture which lures millions of people like me into a trap laid by capitalists who enjoy the fruit of my foolish behaviour.

It is they who decide what is good for me. It is the height of absurdity when a company in the United States or Japan prods me with eye-catching TV advertisements that make me to go for goods that I can live without.

I often tell my folks at home that instead of buying our needs from the supermarket, if we buy our requirements from the old-style grocery shop we could save a lot. In the grocery shop, we buy only what we want over the counter.   more »