While artists often spend long periods in the doldrums, producing nothing new or prodding listlessly over the same tired ground, the fashion industry just gets on with its job.

Season after season, year after year, designers, photographers and models churn out clothes, images, looks.

We may not like everything they do, and what most of us wear may only be very distantly related to the dresses, coats, suits and often quite clearly idiotic assemblages of random fabrics that whiz purposefully down the catwalks.

Yet the effect is a continual refreshing of our collective visual field with new images of aspiration and desire. Without fashion - apart from the fact that for many the task of getting dressed would be considerably simpler - our sense of now would be different, less beautiful and less, well, less now.   more »

He goes on to make the case that the interests of the American ruling class would be better served by launching an attack after Bush's term is over:

"Waiting would also give the U.S. time to rebuild its international standing after the Bush administration is gone...

"But if U.S. imperialism decides that war is the only way that it can achieve [its] objective[s], it will most likely wait until it can delegate this task to a President Clinton or Obama.

"Both of whom have shown no hesitation to rattle the saber against Iran.   more »

In the run-up to Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's visit to the United Nations in New York yesterday, the Iran-bashing sentiment in the US media escalated to new, unprecedented levels.

Presidential hopefuls such as former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, have added fuel to the fire with their increasingly incendiary rhetoric against Iran.

Romney has written to the UN requesting Ahmadinejad's arrest on arriving on US soil, citing the Geneva Conventions

Giuliani has used his European tour to second the warmongering sentiment of French leaders, promising to set Iran back "five to 10 years" if it refuses to comply with demands that it suspend uranium-enrichment activities.   more »

Why did Obama - the self-proclaimed candidate

of “change” - feel compelled to reaffirm his credentials

on fighting the “war on terror”

in the rhetoric of a neoconservative?

Also, Obama’s views about the war in Iraq

- his opposition to which being his single-best

argument for trusting him over Clinton,

who voted to authorize it - have also become fuzzier

as he campaigns to be “commander in chief

   more »

Keywords: democrats, 2008, clinton, president, obama

The US Senate is an oddly conceived body. It was chiefly a constitutional sop to small states with its assurance that each state would have two senators. But it was also designed to allow minorities to halt stampeding majorities.

One senator can stop anything. As a result, through most of its history the Senate has been a deeply intransigent body, the reactionaries' last line of defence.

And since the Democrats took over this year, Republicans - under their leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky - have stalled so much that they're on pace to set a new record for blocked legislation by a factor of three. Then, having gummed up the works, McConnell et al turn around and accuse the Democrats of running a do-nothing Congress!

This, in a nutshell, is why the Democrats have not been able to end the war. Republican legislators know that, however unpopular the war may be, a united pro-war front might help the party keep the White House in 2008, because they can run on the accusation that the Democrats wish defeat and disgrace upon these great United States of America.   more »