With conservative moralists, Republican stalwarts and Christian fundamentalists in retreat, it is the right time to examine America's best kept secret, today's sexual revolution.

The on-going sex scandals involving Republican and Christian worthies have taken the proverbial wind out the sails of the new puritans.

Wedge issues that defined the 2006 election like abortion rights, gay marriage and stem-cell research have lost their edge. America just might be ready to face, embrace its darker sexual side.

Deviant practices have always been a feature of America's sexual landscape. In the past, such activities existed at the periphery of acceptable society.

Today, however, they have become an integral feature of popular experience. Deviance has become an accepted indulgence among a growing number of consenting adults.   more »

It doesn’t hurt that Obama is technically black, something that seems progressive in and of itself to many naive liberal whites(Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Oprah Winfrey and Condoleezza Rice notwithstanding), especially in states where actual black people are relatively scarce.

Obama's technically black identity helps him attract mildly progressive white Iowans and New Hampshire-ites eager to display their often superficial non-racism simply by voting for an African-American.

If I were more inclined to conspiracy rhetoric, I would say that Obama was created and hired by corporate media, Wall Street, and the foreign policy establishment.

His job? To divide and confound the progressive base and to keep the 2008 election safe for imperial plutocracy by setting up a likely narrow-spectrum contest between corporate Hillary and corporate Rudy.   more »

The extent of the credit crunch is more far reaching than many experts predicted according to a series of reports yesterday highlighting the squeeze on banks on both sides of the Atlantic.

British banks were predicted to suffer well into next year from the credit crisis according to one report and can expect to be punished by investors for stagnating, or in some cases falling profits.

In the US, further analysis of the sub-prime mortgage crisis showed the extent of the bad debts could reach $250bn (£128bn) leaving many banks nursing much larger losses than expected.

Stock markets around the world were braced for fresh falls today despite attempts by the G7 leading industrial nations and the International Monetary Fund to boost confidence after Friday's plunge in share prices on Wall Street.   more »

The reality is that Bhutto’s shaky deal with Musharraf is a travesty of democracy.

It was brokered by Washington, which has a decades-long history of sustaining military rule in Pakistan, in pursuit of US imperialism’s predatory ambitions in Central Asia and the Middle East.

The deal was sealed with a National Reconciliation Ordinance that gives an amnesty to Bhutto and numerous other corrupt Pakistani politicians, and, to the satisfaction of the Bush administration, entrenches, in the person of Musharraf, the leading role of the military in Pakistan’s governance for years to come.

Bhutto’s motivations are two-fold. She is anxious to get a share of power and patronage. But even more importantly, she is seeking, as she has herself repeatedly said, to avert a wave of street protests that could spin out of the control of the political elite and destabilize the military.   more »

Then came Bush. At first things were motoring along nicely, and Bush guru Karl Rove's prediction that a permanent conservative majority was coalescing seemed probable. Now it has all crashed and burned for the reasons we know about. But we still don't know what exactly is that "it".

That is, Americans have now experienced a conservative government failing them. But what lesson will they take?

That conservatism itself is exhausted and without answers to the problems that confront American and the world today?

Or will they conclude that the problem hasn't been conservatism per se, just Bush, and that a conservatism that is competent and comparatively honest will suit them just fine?

Conservatives and the Republican presidential candidates hope and argue that it's the latter.   more »