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Politics and the Kitchen Sink

Browsing Posts in politics

Danny Schecter says, on Al Jazeera: Occupy Wall Street seems to be banking on a general strike it hopes to pull off on May Day. Not a few political observers worry that calling for a massive shut down at this point is premature – and not the same as having the organisational network to pull [...]

Ayatollah Fu Manchu

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Over on Lobe Log, Ali Gharib responds to some New York Times article that dutifully pushes war on Iran, and groups all Shias as systemic liars that can’t be trusted. Here is the comment I posted: Hmm! A rather sedate response to what is essentially an image of a glaring, turbaned, hook-nosed darky about to [...]

Back in 2005, Patrick Clawson, of the Israel mouthpiece WINEP (The Washington Institute for Near East Policy), dismissed the Iranian presidential election as “a real race for a meaningless post” ¹. I wrote at the time that the irony² had escaped all of them that this was how the US elections had been described–e.g. by [...]

Soon after (the US) 9/11, it occured to me that it was very likely that Africans would adopt the tactics of Al Qaeda. Whatever else one may say about the latter, they clearly had a dramatic impact! With only nineteen people, they changed the direction of the titan that is the American superpower. While it [...]

On Chris Hayes’ show, Up, William Black is criticizing the recent JOBS Act. It seems like the US Congress is legislating to repeat the same thing that happened in the debt market, but this time with respect to company start-ups. They are rolling back some of the post-Enron regulations which were meant to protect investors. [...]

Back when the previous American war on Iraq started, there were cries of “No war for oil!” coming from the Western Left. It was the culprit they were comfortable with. Nowadays, though, AIPAC‘s and the US media‘s push is so shrill that even the Left is no longer pointing accusatory fingers at oil. They’re like [...]

Over on The American Conservative, Philip Giraldi talks of Israel encircling Iran, this time via Georgia and Azerbaijan. I responded: Israel has been in Iraqi Kurdistan for at least a decade. As for Georgia and Azerbaijan, Iran may have made some counter-moves: if I remember, it sought cooperation with them recently. Both Israel and Iran [...]

Over at The American Conservative, they are getting worked up about Saudi destruction or something of Christian churches. At a glance, the heated discussion appeared to have veered off into comparisons of assorted holy sandals! Whatever! Here’s what I posted: I can’t get past the opening premise of this article! For years (decades?) the Saudis [...]

On the Real News, Sahar Issa, of McClatchy’s Baghdad Bureau, offers some great analysis of the insanity that had engulfed Iraq at the height of the neo-con-era US invasion: I will tell you something. We in Iraq know about proxy wars. We had a very strong proxy war of ourselves here. It was literally Iran [...]

The Dirty Bombs of Fallujah

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Watching Feurat Alani’s documentary “Fallujah, a Lost Generation?” on RT, about the effects of Depleted Uranium bombarded onto Iraq’s Fallujah, by Americans, I am reminded of similar stories about Basra. Basra’s collection of deformed babies came about after the first US war in Iraq, but Fallujah’s fate seems even more horrific. Fallujah’s seem to have [...]