I have a confession to make: I love sucking cock. Maybe that's not such a revelation, considering the other things I've shared in this column, but I'm starting to get the feeling that most women give head just to please their men.

Aside from Liz Phair, where have all the blowjob queens gone? I recently spent a lazy Sunday morning going down on a new lover for over an hour.

He enjoyed every minute, but couldn't come because of some medications he's taking. I was content to maximize my time figuring out what he liked, getting used to his unique shape and smell and taste.

Even my sore jaw the next day was a mark of a job well done. My eagerness surprised him. "I've never been with anyone so enthusiastic," he told me. I wasn't sure how to take that, but I think it was a compliment.   more »

We have pretty much the same totalitarian thought control and censorship in the “liberal” and “democratic,” free speech” West (the onetime so-called First World) as existed in the Soviet bloc.

But I’ve never been able to escape the chilling notion that the problems of elite thought control and top-down moral-ideological narrowing may actually be worse in the “freedom-loving” United States than in places like contemporary Burma and Stalinist Russia.

As Alex Carey suggested in his haunting book Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty, the techniques of mass opinion control are developed on the most advanced levels precisely in societies where rule through sheer state coercion is least legitimate and where people are most free to speak and write without the fear of being violently repressed.

The incentive to “manufacture [mass] consent” from the top down is greatest where the democratic and free-speech traditions are strongest and where absolutist state coercion is least justifiable.

Elites need to control popular thoughts especially where the populace is free to express and act upon them, without fear of the military’s guns.   more »

This new round of sanctions is just one side of the demonization of Iran campaign - as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was once again spinning the other side of the same old scratched vinyl, that of preventing "one of the world's worst regimes from acquiring the world's most dangerous weapons".

The International Atomic Energy Agency still has not found any evidence Iran is developing a nuclear program for military use, and has called for the further engagement of Iran, rather than its isolation.

By branding the IRGC as terrorist, Washington has in fact declared war on the Iranian power elite.

One can imagine what would happen if any developing country branded the US industrial-military complex as "terrorists" - and any number of countries would have plenty of reasons to do so.

By stretching its "war on terror" logic to actually naming names, the Bush administration has boxed itself into no other option than regime change in Iran.   more »

It's striking to walk through Washington or indeed almost any American city and note that the quality of the sidewalks on a given block has a clear correlation with its socioeconomic status.

Republicans are willing to go to the mat to protect private insurance companies from the threat of S-Chip expansion, but many Democrats can't work up the gumption to change a tax loophole that leaves billionaire hedge fund managers paying a lower rate than you or I.

Disaster preparedness is no different. New Orleans was a poor city, and it's no coincidence that the richer people lived on the higher land less vulnerable to flooding.

San Diego, a more prosperous area, benefits not from favorable treatment after disaster strikes, but before the worst comes to pass - during the planning and preparedness phases of disaster response - leading to the disparate outcomes you can see on television, disparities that are not so much caused by the deeper inequities in American life as are reflective of them.   more »

Major reforms, important projects, re-aligning partisan divides are all that much harder without a language that can make these connections.

When political vision is basically personal, it's no surprise that people love and hate presidents - and other partisans - in personalized ways.

That's what marked the politics of the 1990s and the Bush years except for the war: triviality veined with hatred, futility inflated by platitudes.

Yes, Hillary will remind us of this. So will any candidate who can't do better. It is, unfortunately, what we are now in together.   more »