Get Putin
From Erinys website. Kalashnikovs for sale or rent.
As Beatroot notes, the crescendo of Russophobia has climaxed into the international press declaring a new Cold War.
Are we at war with Russia? Well, with Putin, certainly, in case anyone hadn’t noticed. Ever since he started throwing his oil weight around.
It’s a war which puts some very strange bedfellows on the same side. Martin Kelly, who has dug up any number of iffy relationships in the Litvinenko affair, yesterday connected Boris Berezovsky, Erinys, Bell, PR and Iraq. And by association, The Blairs and Richard Perle. Er, what?
The story so far.
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On my way to the elevated subway station today, I caught sight of my
neighborhood's most clearcut (pun very much intended) sign that Santa season
is fully upon us: Christmas tree lots. I detect the familiar faces of the
folks‹positioned, as always, in front of Rite Aid‹hawking pines and firs
long since separated from their roots. According to the National Christmas
Tree Association, approximately 30-35 million "real" Christmas trees are
sold in the U.S. every year and roughly 100,000 people are employed in the
Christmas tree industry.
Noam
Chomsky needs no introduction. He's MIT Institute Professor Emeritus of
linguistics and a leading anti-war critic and voice for over 40 years for
social equity and justice. He's also one
of the world's most influential and widely cited intellectuals on the
Left. Gilbert Achcar is a
Lebanese-French academic, author, social activist, Middle East expert and
professor of politics and international relations at the University of
Paris. Their new book, Perilous Power,
is based on 14 hours of dialogue between them over three days in January, 2006
and updated six months later in July in a separate Epilogue at the end. It covers US foreign policy in the most
volatile and turbulent region in the world, the Middle East, and discusses the
wars in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and Afghanistan as well as such key issues as
terrorism, fundamentalism, oil, democracy, possible war against Iran and much
more. Chomsky and Achcar collaborated
with Stephen Shalom, Professor of Political Science at William Paterson
University acting as moderator to pose questions and keep the discussion on track. 
Think of it as a Tomdispatch.com milestone. This is now the first website to "indict" the President, the Vice President, and their colleagues for defrauding us into war in Iraq. I put that "indict" in quotes because what follows, as former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega makes clear in her new book United States v. George W. Bush et al., is "not an actual indictment." It can't be, of course; but consider it the second best thing. 
As long as there has been a
U.S. military, people have been
leaving it. That choice has never
been more appropriate than today. Individuals who signed up to defend the United States are engaged in a
war that was sold on the basis of lies, was entirely unnecessary, is making us
less safe, has nothing to do with defending anyone, and which involves the
horror of slaughtering men, women, and children by the hundreds of
thousands. The majority of
Americans want the war to end and just voted accordingly in the Congressional
elections. The majority of Iraqis
want the war to end. The majority
of American service men and women in Iraq want the war to end. And taking part in this war is illegal,
whether you are ordered to do so or not.
Keep in mind, I've run Tomdispatch.com for only a few years, but I've
been a book editor in mainstream publishing for over 30 years. Sometime
last spring, I was on the phone with former federal prosecutor
Elizabeth de la Vega talking about books she might someday write, when
she suddenly said to me, "You know what I'd like to do?" When I asked
what, she replied, "What I've done all my life."
Since every British tabloid has linked the dissident Litvinenko with Politkovskaya, let’s link on...
combat. Tanks crawling over broken walls, past burned-out buildings. Quick cut to the skies: lumbering bombers releasing their payloads over sprawling cities, while fighters dart in and out around them and black clouds of ack-ack explode with sudden menace. A brief sweep of the enemy dead, frozen in their final agonies across a churned-up field. Then a long line of refugees, plodding along the edge of a highway while American troop trucks, jeeps, and half-tracks roar past them in the opposite direction.
Ecuador's Supreme Electoral Tribunal is still counting
the votes in the November 26 presidential runoff
election but the results seem clear - with one-half of
them tallied so far they show: the peoples' candidate,
Rafael Correa, 68% and the bible-toting billionaire
banana tycoon oligarch who's also the richest man in
the country, Alvaro Noboa, - 32% - results consistent
with two exit polls and an unofficial citizens
election watchdog group, but without the completion of
the suspended vote count in the Guayas province that's
a Noboa stronghold that when done should raise his
percent of the total but nowhere near enough to close
the current electoral gap against him.
My wife and I moved into a new apartment earlier this year. Just a few
blocks from our old place, it's been a major quality of life improvement in
almost every possible way. One unexpected adjustment, however, was closet
space. This moderately sized one-bedroom apartment has only two narrow
closets. (You couldn't fit a scandalous skeleton in them if you tried.)
Keeping in mind that the building is more than 78 years old, how might we
explain this egregious "oversight"?
“People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. They not only don’t forget; they also strike back.†
Last week, I had one of those clarifying moments when the enormity of the American fiasco stirred my livers and lights again. I was riding in a car at sundown between St. Cloud and Minneapolis on I-94 through a fifty-mile-plus corridor of bargain shopping infrastructure on each side of the highway. The largest automobile dealerships I have ever seen lay across the edge of the prairie like so many UFO landing strips, with eerie forests of sodium-vapor lamps shining down on the inventory. The brightly colored signs of the national chain fried food parlors vied for supremacy of the horizon with the big box logos. The opposite lane was a blinding river of light as the cars plied north from the Twin Cities to these distant suburbs in the pre-Thanksgiving rush hour.
ngs already, been killing them for years, with sanctions, bombs, snipers, chaos, deprivation, whatever. Who cares? You know what's really important? If Jim Baker can "