Oy vey.
by Stephen C. Webster
A 12-year-old candidate for Iran's presidency said that if elected, he would buy Hawaii from the United States and lease it to Israel.An introductory sentence that bizarre simply cannot be made up.From Israeli publication Haaretz: A 12-year-old Iranian schoolboy who hopes to unseat hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has vowed that, if elected, he will resettle Israelis in Hawaii, The Scotsman reported on Friday. |
Images, the Law and War
by Adam Liptak
WASHINGTON - It was a hypothetical question in a Supreme Court argument, and it was posed almost 40 years ago. But it managed to anticipate and in some ways to answer President Obama's argument for withholding photographs showing the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. |
Al-Barakaat: the little charity that could have saved Somalia
by Allison Kilkenny
Most Americans only hear about Somalia if the country's name precedes "is a failed state," or "is a hotbed of pirate activity." But what many Americans don't know is that the US worked to undermine a Somalian charity that stepped in to provide aid to the chaotic state. |
BUYER'S REMORSE: Can we trade in Obama for someone with a conscience?
by Mike Whitney
Anyone who has ever wasted good money on a clunker only to drop the transmission 15 minutes after leaving the car-lot, knows the feeling. It's like a swift-kick in the groin followed by weeks of fist-pounding rage. It's called buyer's remorse; "Gawd, I wish I hadn't bought that piece of dogshite!" |
Obama Can’t Turn the Page on Bush
by Frank Rich
TO paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions. |
Cheney, Master of Pain
by Maureen Dowd
Dick Cheney has done many dastardly things. But presiding over policies so saturnine that they ended up putting the liberal speaker from San Francisco on the hot seat about torture may be one of his proudest achievements.Nancy Pelosi’s bad week of blithering responses about why she did nothing after being briefed on torture has given Republicans one of their happiest — and harpy-est — weeks in a long time. They relished casting Pelosi as contemptible for not fighting harder to stop their contemptible depredations against the Constitution. That’s Cheneyesque chutzpah. |
Bible quotes adorned covers of top-secret Rumsfeld intelligence reports
by David Edwards and Jeremy Gantz
Top secret military intelligence briefings prepared by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and often hand-delivered to George W. Bush featured Crusades-like Bible quotes above triumphant photos of the U.S. military effort in Iraq.Less than one month after U.S. and coalition forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, a “Worldwide Intelligence Update” reached then-President Bush with the following quote on the cover of the briefing, above photos of jubilant Iraqi crowds in newly liberated Baghdad: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death.” |
Biden discloses Cheney's 'undisclosed location'
by Jeremy Gantz
Oops, Biden did it again. Said too much, that is.Newsweek contributing Washington editor Eleanor Clift relays a very revealing anecdote over at one of the magazine's blogs.Vice President Biden, it seems, in late March told a table of people at the annual Gridiron Club Dinner where Dick Cheney hid out after the 9/11 attacks: a bunker underneath the Naval Observatory in Washington, where vice presidents have lived since 1974. Here's the story: |
