Following Lindsay Lohan's recent cocaine arrest, plus allegations that Paris Hilton regularly snorts the stuff, we've become more aware of the word "partying". Frequently it is a euphemism for doing drugs.

Celebrities are forever saying in interviews: 'X was partying a lot at that time'. What they mean is that they are addicted to drugs.

Lohan joins a long list of young actors who have battled drugs and alcohol problems, including River Phoenix, Drew Barrymore, and Macaulay Culkin.

David Deitch, an addiction specialist of more than 40 years and director of Phoenix House, a national nonprofit provider of substance-abuse treatments, told AP the glitter and glamour of Hollywood is partly to blame.   more »

b>The surge has become irrelevant.

Firstly because it has failed to produce the promised results: the Iraqi government has made zero progress towards any of the needed reforms and compromises.

The Iraqi military is no more prepared to take over now than it was six months ago, the number of Iraqis forced from their homes has risen instead of fallen.

And the political situation is even less stable with various parties withdrawing or threatening to withdraw from the government.   more »

How often have we been told that when fascism comes to the US it will be wrapped in the American flag and spouting patriotic slogans and speeches?

Jingoism is so much a part of the ruling ideology that few recognise its kinship with fascism.

Jingoism glorifies the military and war, thinking violence is the way to accomplish its goals. It fosters a cult of death (it is heroic to die for the fatherland). It thinks attacking other peoples and nations is just fine.

A Thin Line Between America's Extreme Conservatism and Fascism

What are the basic characteristics of fascist propaganda that sets it apart from ordinary extreme conservatism. It has five basic characteristics.   more »

Officials said on Thursday that the collapse of the bridge was not related to terrorism, and there was no earthquake or accident that triggered the event.

Nick Coleman, writing in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, commented that this made the disaster “worse than any of those things, because it was more mundane and more insidious: the death and destruction was the result of incompetence and indifference. In a word, it was avoidable.”

Such official incompetence and indifference occur within a definite context.

For decades, social infrastructure in the US has been starved of resources, even as trillions of dollars have been funneled into the pockets of a small layer of the population.

Hundreds of billions are spent every year on the US military, but when it comes to the physical infrastructure and basic social services, adequate funds are never available.   more »

Bomber Obama Goes for the Rabid Right-Wing Vote

Obama knows best! What would be the best way to pull America — and the world — out of the dizzying spiral of the "War on Terror," which has spread death, destruction and American extremism across the globe? Why, invading Pakistan, of course!

Yes, sending American tanks, troops and warplanes into the only Islamic nation with a nuclear arsenal — and a large, angry, powerful and growing fundamentalist movement to boot — would obviously be an act of wise and prudent statecraft.

It is, after all, the very strategy now being advocated by such brilliant counselors as William Kristol and his doughty comrades in the ever-expanding "Long War" against evilism'.

That's why we were truly heartened to see Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama boldly step across the partisan divide and embrace the policies of the bloodthirsty, crazed neocons in his "major foreign policy speech" on Wednesday.   more »