"It's a free country."

How often do you hear someone say that phrase? Or, does this lyric ring a bell: "I'm proud to be an American/ where at least I know I'm free." You can never go broke selling something if you put the words "freedom," "liberty," or "American" in it. Just look at the "A" section of the yellow pages. Throw "extreme" in there if you want to sell to anyone under the age of 25. I'm waiting to pass the kiosk in the mall selling american extreme freedom liberty cell phones.

It's funny that we live in times when we're thumping our chests proclaiming how free and American we are while at the same time surrendering every inch of what that really means. Not just because the Department of Homeland Security solicited proposals from companies for shock bracelets for people traveling on airlines, in order to stun potential terrorists, not to mention the lady in row 23 who won't tell her annoying kid to sit down, shut up, and stop pounding on the backs of the seats.

So, just how many wrong wars are the American people supposed to fight? Here we've got a president that criminally deceived us into making war on Iraq and who is now trying to plunge us into another criminal venture against Iran!

If you swallowed the Bush lie he struck Iraq based on faulty CIA analysis doesn't his motivation become clear when he rejects the new National Intelligence Estimate's report that told him there is no basis for attacking Iran?

By rejecting it, Bush proves he'll wage war no matter what his intelligence agencies tells him! He's been telling Iran to "come clean" when he's neck deep in what comes out of the hind end of a Texas longhorn.

Every now and then I am fortunate enough to communicate with someone who has near complete insight into our political process, why things happen and where it seems likely to be headed. Recently I received this analysis from a high powered political consultant whose name is withheld for obvious reasons. He/she has to live and work in the political world and for either party. In any case, I found it breathtaking in its fundamental analysis and its clarity -- clarity being no easy thing to accomplish is the swamp of media-consumerism-politics. Here it is:
-- Joe Bageant

Much has been written by political pundits in their attempt to explain the unexpected victory of Senator Barack Obama over Senator Hillary Clinton in this year's Democratic Presidential Primary. When looking at the results of this race, none of the conventional political math that would help one handicap the outcome would make one conclude that Senator Obama would win this contest.

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Attorney General Michael Mukasey has caught some flak for proposing, in an address to the American Enterprise Institute, that Congress should declare war on Al Qaeda.

Instead, he should be applauded for his brilliant idea.

First of all, Mukasey is admitting, whether he wants to admit it or not, that the Bush/Cheney program of capturing alleged terrorists and holding them for years as enemy combatants without charge in detention centers in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and various undisclosed locations around the globe, and of torturing many of them, are illegal actions that violate US law and International Law. So let's give him credit for that.

— from Truthdig

Barack Obama is betraying his promise of change and is in danger of becoming just another political hack.

Yes, just like former maverick John McCain, who has refashioned himself as a mindless rubber stamp for the most inane policies of the miserably failed Bush administration. Both candidates are embracing, rather than challenging, the fundamental irrationality of Bush's "war on terror," which substitutes hysteria for rational analysis in appraising the dangers the country faces.

— from TomDispatch

"Lisa, the whole reason we have elected officials is so we don't have to think all the time. Just like that rainforest scare a few years back. Our officials saw there was a problem and they fixed it, didn't they?" -- Homer Simpson

On June 24, 2008, Louie and I curled up on the couch to watch seven of the nation's foremost water resources experts testify before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee's Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment.

This was a new experience for us. For my part, the issue to be addressed -- "Comprehensive Watershed Management Planning" -- was certainly a change of pace from the subjects I ordinarily follow in Judiciary and Intelligence Committee hearings. I wasn't even entirely sure what a "watershed" was. I knew that, in a metaphorical sense, the word referred to a turning point, but I was a bit fuzzy about its meaning in the world of hydrology. (It's the term used to describe "all land and water areas that drain toward a river or lake.")

— from Foreign Policy In Focus

As the 63rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki approaches, the world continues to face a litany of nuclear concerns. There is the failure to safeguard all the nuclear material lying loose around the globe. And proponents of nuclear power have gained ground as a result of the current energy crisis.

But the radioactive rhetoric printed on newspaper opinion pages and proclaimed from would-be presidential podiums puts Iran at the top of the nuclear list.

“Bomb, Bomb Iran,” sang John McCain -- the man running for President of the United States on a record of foreign policy experience, military know-how, and gravitas -- to the tune of The Beach Boys hit “Barbara Ann.” More recently, Benny Morris, an Israeli historian writing in The New York Times, opined that “Israel’s own nuclear arsenal” could be “the only means available that will actually destroy the Iranian nuclear project,” laying out a new argument for the central fallacy of the Cold War -- winnable nuclear war -- long thought to be in the ash bin of history.

Barack Obama is taking a commanding position in the national security debate. Governments in Iraq and Afghanistan clearly prefer the Obama strategy. They clearly reject the McCain idea that appears to support a permanent U.S. mega-presence in Iraq. They strongly support Obama's strategy of a major diplomatic initiative towards Iran to test that option.

McCain's problem is simple: He cannot provide any meaningful support to Afghanistan without also providing some meaningful withdrawal from Iraq. This is basic common sense and basic military strategy grounded in reality.

McCain's problem is political: From day one, he has always shortchanged the real war against terrorism and the war in Afghanistan in favor of the wrong war in Iraq.