Football superstar David Beckham was officially unveiled as a player of the Los Angeles Galaxy Friday, marking the most ambitious move by a US football team since Pele joined the New York Cosmos in 1975.

Lit up by a rock music soundtrack, and attended by 600 members of the press as well as banks of screaming fans, it had all the razzmatazz you expect of football's biggest one-man brand.

"Why says LA doesn't love soccer?" cried the mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, bedecked in an LA Galaxy shirt at the club's Home Depot Center stadium. "Do we love David Beckham?" he added. "Ah, come on, do we love David Beckham?"

Villaraigosa captured the exclamatory mood as Beckham met his new supporters for the first time since the moment in January when the former England captain shocked the sporting world by announcing his transfer from Real Madrid.   more »

So to hear the president and the White House spin it (and the media dutiful report it), the interim progress report on Iraq the administration will submit to Congress today is "a mixed bag."

According to Bush's scorecard, progress on eight of the 18 benchmarks set by Congress in May has been "satisfactory," on another eight it has been "unsatisfactory," and two are too close to call.

And this, according to the president, "is a cause for optimism."

That's like a doctor telling you that while your child has shiny hair he also has a brain tumor -- and you coming away thinking the doctor's report is "a mixed bag." That's insane.   more »

There is only one real difference between the capacity of a 'democracy' and a dictatorship to wage war: democracies invariably engage much more widely in deceptive war propaganda, to whip up and persuade the public.

Democracies that wage war need to produce much more propaganda to whip up their citizens, and at the same time to camouflage their policies much more intensely in hypocritical moral cant to fool the voters.

Every time the phrase "War on Terror" is seriously used, we're swept back out into the "desert of the real," the hyper-reality of non-events created for propaganda purposes, to manipulate the public through generating an endless state of fear.

Fighting terror is a non-starter, if it is seen as making war, taking prisoners, torturing them, locking them up and throwing away the key.   more »

The impact on consumer spending from falling house prices was being compounded by credit becoming scarcer and more expensive, he said.

This week's turmoil on Wall Street and the signs that the housing market remains in decline will increase pressure on Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, to signal a willingness to cut interest rates later this year.

Wall Street's financial institutions and pension funds are thought to be heavily exposed to possible losses in collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) - packages of debt including mortgages owed by American households that are bought and sold in the financial markets.

After booming in the low interest-rate environment from 2003 to 2005, the past two years have seen a savage retrenchment in the US real estate market, with fewer homes being built, prices falling and a sharp increase in mortgage arrears and repossessions.   more »

Still they persist with the combination of happy talk about how well things are going on the one hand as their supporters engage in a campaign of character assassination toward anyone who feels compelled to deal with reality on the other.

On and on it goes. Our president continues to assert against every available shred of evidence that we are fighting those who attacked us on September 11 in Iraq instead of enemies that he, himself, helped create with his foolish policies.

And yet the game goes on. Billions are wasted. Thousands are killed. The chaos grows and grows and yet at home, nothing changes.

The president lies; the neocons repeat those lies with even more enthusiasm; and our soldiers pay for it with their lives.   more »