War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
Seemingly so long ago: Before the war with Iraq, Powell bluntly told Bush that if he sent U.S. troops there “you’re going to be owning this place.” Powell and his deputy and closest friend, Richard L. Armitage, used to refer to what they called “the Pottery Barn rule” on Iraq: “You break it, you own…
Left my post for just a week and imbecilic chaos ensues. As if in a fevered nightmare, the peoples of the world, and especially US peoples have taken complete leave of any known sense, and have fully and absolutely embraced bat-shit crazy. On the far side of Wall Street, which had the wildest ride in…
Home from the holiday — nearly a decade since I’d had one of those ‘paid vacations‘ and it was a most-awesome trip. Since not a real trusting sort, and with my Jeep Comanche currently being in a most-mysterious mechanical condition (to me, anyway), I journeyed south by AmTrak last week to visit a couple of…
Today starts the first official vacation I’ve had in years — the last a near-decade ago while working for a newspaper — and the feeling is already weird. I’ll not be posting again until most-likely next weekend as this ‘vacation‘ is the first time I’ve been disconnected from the online world for any length of…
In a time so awash in dramatic events, especially the last couple of weeks and the debt ceiling/financial markets bombast — worse Wall Street week in three years, the US downgraded from AAA to AA+ — and this morning came reports of 31 US GIs killed in an Afghan helicopter crash, a commemoration of a…
(Illustration found here). Yesterday’s suck hole on Wall Street is most-likely a harbinger of an anxious future. Scared of all kinds of money-entangled shit, the stock market cratered more than 500 points, the Asian markets following with the European markets this morning still tracking downward. Oops, we were wrong: “The conventional wisdom on Wall Street…
One of the most-profound problems of humankind is the inability to see no tomorrow — or at least a tomorrow so unlike today. Life continues burns in the soul. Not so fast there, Sherlock. Humanity loves delusion if the alternative is unthinkable. Yet even as the morning starts to break here on California’s northern coast,…
One standing cliche of horror movies is the old trope of the menaced babysitter being scared out of her most-beautiful wits by a killer via telephone calls, which as turns out, are being made “from inside the house.” The just concluded debt ceiling slasher/torture porn production in DC conjures up that same bromide as the…
One reason among many why US people should fear the debt ceiling’s ugly docudrama: “It set the template for the future. In the future, Neil, no president — in the near future, maybe in the distant future — is going to be able to get the debt ceiling increased without a re-ignition of the same…
Despite that most-heralded, most-joyous news from President Obama last night on a debt ceiling compromise deal, US peoples shouldn’t be so happy, in fact, they should have an attack of great financial fright. Obama helped create a monster even in the eyes of his own: “This deal does not even attempt to strike a balance…