In the last decade, Americans have had extraordinary opportunities to expand personal debt.

The Fed's low interest rates have created a culture of borrowing which has convinced many people that debt equals wealth. It's not; and the collapse in the housing market will prove how lethal that theory really is.

To large extent, the housing bubble has concealed the systematic destruction of America's industrial and manufacturing base.

Low interest rates have lulled the public to sleep while millions of high-paying jobs have been outsourced.   more »

The failed bombings were, Brown insisted, an attack on "our British way of life" and the "values that we represent", "unrelated" to the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or any other conflict.

He compared the fight against the bombers' ideology with the struggle against communism and called for a similar "propaganda effort" to win "hearts and minds".

In the days since, this "it's nothing to do with the war" refrain has since been taken up with gusto by large parts of the media.

The pro-war Times and Telegraph have led the field, with neoconservative commentators and politicians hammering home the Blair-Bush message that terror is simply the product of an evil ideology.   more »

The deputies smelled marijuana and searched the car

They found less than an ounce (28 grams) of marijuana

along with the prescription tranquilisers

and painkillers Xanax, Valium and Vicodin,

and the attention deficit disorder drug Adderall

   more »

Keywords: drugs, weed, tranquillisers, marijuana

But really, you do have to laugh at the vicious antics this administration, and perhaps Dick Cheney in particular.

That most nefarious molester of U.S. law and ignorer of all political integrity and deeply homophobic father of a creepily lesbian daughter and overall gruntingly guff sneerer at all moral principle.

Masterful mocker of everything you somehow still manage to think, even in your most despondent and ethically disillusioned state, that American politics is somehow supposed to be about.

For it was Cheney, you well know, who yanked Bush's puppet strings in order to get Libby off the hook.   more »

This cell of highly networked professionals had developed a narrative about the world that necessitated their drastic action.

The kind of thinking they would be engaged in would typically be:

"Britain and the US are conducting a genocide against Arab Muslims in Iraq, are ethnically cleansing Fallujah, Baqubah, and Baghdad, and this must be stopped and cannot be borne.

"Something must be done, something dramatic, to draw the attention of an apathetic public to the kind of policies they are supporting."

It's clear that a lot of this radical Islamic thought is now being driven by the Iraq War and to some extent Afghanistan, and that social peace in Europe may well require Western withdrawal from those countries.   more »