If there is one reason to watch Larry King Live — unrelated, that is, to a perverse pleasure in testing the limits of banality and tedium to life-threatening extremes — it’s the chance to play Are You Optimistic? — a drinking game based on the CNN host’s Tourette’s-like penchant for asking his squirming guests if he/she is “optimistic”.

For the uninitiated viewer, this usually occurs whenever ‘The King of Talk’ has run through his entire repertoire of non-sequitur softball questions before his hour of dead airtime is up, thus opening up the playing field for a spirited round of blood alcohol poisoning that the whole family can enjoy.

And unless you enjoy the thrills of competitive flatlining, watching this Gab-Fest equivalent of a frontal lobotomy (without the benefit of a bottle in front of you) is like having to endure, fully conscious, botched brain surgery performed by a Borscht belt hack on the back alley abortion circuit.   more »

Mari K. Oye, a high school senior from Wellesley, Massachusetts, who at the White House this week presented President Bush a handwritten letter, signed by her and 49 other Presidential Scholars, protesting his Administration's use of torture.

When these Presidential Scholars from all over the country met one another in Washington, they discovered how many of them felt so strongly about the issue, and about seizing the opportunity to be heard.

As Leah Libresco, a Scholar from Mineola, Long Island, New York, said the next day on CNN, the view among many of them was that torture is a non-partisan issue:

"I don't think this is a controversial issue. I don't think human dignity and human rights is a controversial issue, so once we started talking to people about the idea of speaking up, people kept coming forward and saying yes, this is important."   more »

"Ms. Dewey" is search with an flirtatious attitude

It's interactive nirvana

If you can’t think of anything to search for,

she will fidget for a while and eventually

reach out and tap on the screen

“Helloooo...type something here...”

   more »

Keywords: web, avatar, interactive, internet, future

As the Iraq war that Vice President Dick Cheney created continues to shred American—and many more Iraqi—lives, further documentation has emerged proving that, even during failed wars, the merchants of death profit.

No company has profited more from the carnage in Iraq than Halliburton, which Cheney headed before choosing himself as Bush’s running mate. One shudders at the blissful arrogance of this modern Daddy Warbucks, who sees no conflict of interest over the blood-soaked profits garnered by the once-bankrupt division of the company that left him rich.

This week’s evidence of the continuing corruption of Halliburton and its subsidiaries profiteering from contracts costing American taxpayers an unbelievable $22 billion stems from a report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

The report, only one of many about Halliburton’s recently severed subsidiary KBR, focuses on work done in Baghdad’s super-secure Green Zone.   more »

It’s not for nothing that John Edwards is losing to Hillary-Obama in both the big donor dollar race and in the race for name recognition and favorable attention in dominant media.

He’s speaking the languages of labor, the New Deal and the (stillborn) War on Poverty to a noteworthy extent in a time when the labor movement and the notion of positive government action for egalitarian and anti-poverty ends have been officially proclaimed dead and over (drowned in the icy individualist waters of neoliberal calculation).

And in a period when the issues of inequality and economic insecurity resonate with a considerable and growing section of the ever more class-fractured citizenry.

The other thing is that Edwards is a threat to the status quo if he wins.   more »