War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
Today eight years ago, Oct. 7, 2001… “On my order, U.S. forces have begun strikes on terrorist camps of al Qaeda, and the military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan,” Bush said in a somber, televised address from the White House Treaty Room. … “We are supported by the collective will of the world,”…
A major, major story, though few in the US are even aware of it. (Illustration found here). Via The Brad Blog on Monday, Marc Grossman, a former US ambassador to Turkey and George Jr.’s third-ranking State Department honcho — right behind Colin Powell and Richard Armitage — was targeted as part of a “decade-long investigation”…
This from Josh Marshall and his fledging Talking Points Memo on Sept. 11, 2001 — unaware of even a worse horror coming: TPM, of course, is normally all about arguments among us, among Americans. But all of that falls deep into the background now. And my support, and I’m sure yours too, is with our…
“They stuff people’s heads down the toilet the first day at Stonewall,” he told Harry. “Want to come upstairs and practice?” “No, thanks,” said Harry. “The poor toilet’s never had anything as horrible as your head down it — it might be sick.” — Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone According to Juan Cole’s most-essential…
As I was thinking fairly-clear this morning — thinking is sometimes for me a really, really mega-complicated ordeal and not so unclouded — and although mostly about all kinds of related/unrelated shit, the focus finally came to war, which is part and partial to this whole blog, and on today’s complete-whole world the life-and-death real…
In my eighth-grade history class (circa 1962), we would have studied a historical document similar to the one released on Monday, and although content might have been far less graphic, one thing was for sure –Â it would not be anywhere, anyhow at all connected to the US; most-likely from centuries past, in some more…
UPDATE BELOW The war-worn and weary Afghan people go to the polls tomorrow for a national election amidst Taliban scare tactics and a weak central government unable to comprehend the inevitable. In October 2004, Moqadasa Sidiqi (left), was the first Afghan to cast a ballot in the first national election post-Taliban, but she did so in…
Today 60 years ago — Aug. 12, 1949 — was the fourth installment of what has been termed the “Geneva Conventions,” a series of documents meant not to stop war (what piece of paper could do that?), or define weaponry, but to set humanitarian standards for treatment of war victims. The first three ‘conventions’ —…
Bill Clinton hasn’t ever meant much to me, other than being a greasy political animal with bad taste, thus seemingly just an inadvertent knuckle-head. (Illustration found here). This past week, however, the old bubba-boy seemed to have pulled off a neat turn-of-the-hand, if the appearance is true, by bringing two US journalists home after they’d been…
Although I’ve been working on some other projects the past few days, this came up last weekend and is such a glaring example of how this country in reality will never recover from the last eight years, and since I’d seen no comment about it anywhere in any blogs or news commentaries, I just have…