Remember a positive news article written about any world leader that the U.S. government has deemed an enemy. You can’t. Try to distinguish from week to week the content of Time and Newsweek. You can’t--it’s Pepsi versus Coke, transferred to the world of the printed word.

How is this conformity accomplished? In part, it is the product of market relations - businesses (and media is big business) attempting to produce what will sell the most for the least cost, and at the highest price possible. That means appealing to the lowest common denominator and not offending any target buyers.

But it is also a product of subtle and not-so-subtle forms of pressure. Many articles, books, television shows and movies have been either edited or cancelled over the years based on threats by investors or advertisers to pull their support.

Careers have been ruined for those who fail to conform, as the McCarthy era in the U.S. showed most glaringly.

Above all, the media are run by capitalists as the rest of the capitalist class. There is a tacit acceptance of capitalism, in the same way that in the old slave South, public attacks on slavery weren’t permissible. The same is true of the bourgeois media today.   more »

he only real question about the planned “surge” in Iraq — which is better described as a Vietnam-style escalation — is whether its proponents are cynical or delusional.

Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, thinks they’re cynical. He recently told The Washington Post that administration officials are simply running out the clock, so that the next president will be “the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof.”

Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science for his research on irrationality in decision-making, thinks they’re delusional.

Mr. Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon recently argued in Foreign Policy magazine that the administration’s unwillingness to face reality in Iraq reflects a basic human aversion to cutting one’s losses — the same instinct that makes gamblers stay at the table, hoping to break even.   more »

Like the word hero, the vitality of the sentiment expressed by “support our troops” has been sapped by mindless iteration and the Machiavellian genius of warmongers.

It has become little more than a patriotic platitude on par with, “God Bless America,” and a euphemism for “support our war.”

As a balm to the national conscience for once again consigning our troops to the killing field, it is the battle cry that leads and sustains our country in an unjust war.

In a recent Military Times Poll, only 35 percent of our troops approved of the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war, while only 23 percent believed Congress was looking out for them.

The troops are telling us they do not feel supported by the politicians who sent them to the killing field for a dose of the “cure.”   more »

n the wake of last year's controversy over the publication of cartoons of the prophet Mohammed, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad decided to launch an international cartoon contest.

The objective: invite people from all over the world to question the reality of the Holocaust. The contest drew participants from all over the world and yielded more than 200 Holocaust-related cartoons.

The first prize went to Moroccan cartoonist Abdellah Derkaoui. As you can see above, his caricature features an Israeli crane building a high wall around Jerusalem.

In the background, half hidden by the wall, lies the dome of the Al-Aqsa mosque. Painted on the wall is a picture of the entrance to a death camp.   more »

At the heart of President George Bush's scheme to stave off defeat is the famous "surge" in US troop numbers of some 20,000 to 30,000 men, in addition to the 145,000 soldiers already in Iraq.

These extra forces are somehow expected to gain control of greater Baghdad - with a population of 7 million - and central Iraq, something the US army has failed to do in three and a half years.

It is one of the most long -sustained American myths in Iraq that if they had had significantly more combat brigades in the first year of the war, the insurgency would have been swiftly crushed.

Generals in the Pentagon critical of the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and eager to put all the blame on him for the débâcle, claim all would have been well had he sent a bigger army.   more »

A new front in the “global war on terror” has emerged with its center in war-torn Somalia.

The target of the new front, the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), both brought back normalcy to seemingly untamable southern Somalia and anxiously legislated morality to the point of social suffocation.

According to the U.S. State Department, its greatest sin was its purported link to al-Qaida.

Washington-supported Ethiopian troops carried out a preemptive attack against Somalia at the end of December. Ethiopian tanks roared all the way to the capital Mogadishu and then on to Kismayo near the Kenyan border. The invasion proved easier than expected.   more »