The entire political spectrum ranging from the ‘libertarian’ left, through the progressive editors of the Nation to the entire far right neo-con/Zionist war party and free market Berkeley/Chicago/Harvard academics, with a single voice, hailed the election of Barack Obama as a ‘historic moment’, a ‘turning point in American history and other such histrionics. Introduction The... Read More

The Obama team is taking shape and the new rainbow coalition will include maverick Republicans who see the light. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans have already confirmed the same leadership team that lost earlier this month while the Great White Hope of the GOP is in Alaska writing her book, with a little help from her friends... Read More

According to the British Telegraph a high turnout of California blacks supporting Barack Obama helped to pass Proposition Eight, banning gay marriage, in a statewide referendum last week. Since Obama’s presence on the ticket increased the black percentage of the vote total from 6 percent in 2004 to 10 percent this year, the referendum passed... Read More

Redistribution is never an issue when the money is flowing upwards. It's only when working people are poised to get a few scraps that all hell breaks loose. That's when self-styled "mavericks" and their political cadres spring into action and unleash their vitriol at anyone who challenges the failed "trickle-down" dogma of the investor class.... Read More

The presidential elections in the US, once again, provide an acid test of the integrity and consequential conduct of US intellectuals. If it is the duty and responsibility of the public intellectual to speak truth to power, the recent statements of most of our well-known and prestigious public pundits have failed miserably. Instead of highlighting,... Read More

Despite my desire to see John McCain and his brand of neocon-Republicanism soundly defeated, I can’t stand the idea of awarding my vote to his leftist, black-nationalist adversary Barack Obama. I’ll therefore do in this presidential race what I’ve done in every other presidential contest since 1988 (when I allowed myself to be talked into... Read More

Recently I’ve come across two statements that have evoked radically different public reactions. One is by a Minnesota Republican congresswoman, Michelle Bachmann, who told Chris Matthews on his TV program that Obama holds “anti-American views,� like other unnamed members of Congress. The far more significant remark is by Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a professor of politics and... Read More

WASHINGTON - Before this - thankfully - last United States presidential debate, Republican candidate Senator John McCain had promised "I'll whip [Barack] Obama's you-know-what". Well, he whipped nothing. He told Americans he was not President George W Bush. And then he presented himself as Joe the Plumber - a new working class heir to vice... Read More

Having missed the first two presidential debates because they conflicted with "Dancing with the Stars," I was quite excited to note that the third debate posed no programming conundrum and that it would start at nine o'clock, meaning that I would be able to watch the first hour before falling asleep. What I saw was... Read More

I attended a reunion dinner last night with about fifteen former CIA colleagues from the Directorate of Operations. The discussion inevitably turned to politics and it soon became clear that I was the only one present who would not be voting for John McCain. Though feeling somewhat like General Custer at the Little Big Horn,... Read More

Sarah Palin basically adhered to a straight Bush foreign policy, as Joe Biden noted, though there were a couple of exceptions. Her great love for Israel and her willingness to let Tel Aviv attack Iran as if there would be no consequences for the United States is a result of both her Israel-centric view of... Read More

WASHINGTON and SAO PAULO - The George W Bush administration's US$700 billion no-accountability scheme, globally, informally dubbed "cash for trash", is making all the headlines. Simultaneously, there's the small matter of the United Nations General Assembly sanctioning the troubled birth of a new, multipolar world. As a 21st-century counterpart to the Dadaist Manifesto, this chain... Read More

PARIS — The French are still trying to understand how Barack Obama popped out of nowhere to run for the world's most powerful office. Now, they are struggling to comprehend last week's Republican convention that produced the political bombshell from Alaska. French, like many North Americans, were stunned and confused by Sen. John McCain's surprise... Read More

"Starting in January, in a John McCain-Sarah Palin administration, we're going to lay more pipelines ... build more nuclear plants ... create jobs with clean coal ... and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal and other alternative sources." This is how a 44-year-old woman, mother of five, governor of Alaska for only two years, pro-life,... Read More

ST PAUL - An energy explosion - literally. "Starting in January, in a John McCain-Sarah Palin administration, we're going to lay more pipelines ... build more nuclear plants ... create jobs with clean coal ... and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal and other alternative sources." This is how a 44-year-old woman, mother of five,... Read More

Last week it dawned on me while listening to the two major presidential candidates talk about abortion that their topic meant about as much to them as river boat gambling. Like having gambling facilities placed on the edge of a river from whose activities the state can then draw revenues, the politics of abortion means... Read More

How quickly time passes! It has been a mere year and a half since the first candidate debates, and the party conventions are upon us already. Next week, the Democratic Party convention in Denver — "Most Diverse in Party History" boasts the website. The following week, the Republicans in Minneapolis-St. Paul — "Twin Cities Promise... Read More

"Change� and “hope� are not words one associates with Senator Joe Biden, a man so ripely symbolic of everything that is unchanging and hopeless about our political system that a computer simulation of the corporate-political paradigm senator in Congress would turn out “Biden� in a nano-second. The first duty of any senator from Delaware is... Read More

I've been receiving a number of really nasty anonymous e-mails regarding my blog piece last week that suggested the possibility that the Office of Special Plans rather than CIA actually forged the December 2003 letter that linked Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. The e-mails appeared to come from a common source as they all praised Doug... Read More

NEW YORK - How mud-wallowingly deep may a multi-millionaire US presidential campaign go? Way deep - deeper and deeper. And this is only early August. Republican Senator John McCain's presidential campaign's strategic decision is now all too obvious. Swift-boating Democratic Senator Barack Obama is the only way to go. The McCain-painted Obama is emerging as... Read More

One of the false signals that left-leaning, hawkish Republicans like McCain get from the media establishment is that they should be looking to perform certain “sensitive� acts, and particularly if those acts acts indicate that they're 'reaching out.' In McCain's case his reaching leftward has cut it predictably with some groups. Such gestures have brought... Read More

Barack Obama proved yesterday why November's presidential election will end in a 50-state sweep. John McCain has no chance. It's like George Bush climbing into the ring with Mike Tyson; one thundering left hook and the Crawford Caligula would be sprawled across the canvas in a pool of his own blood. "No mas"! The same... Read More

Obama's candidacy is over; kaput. He's already stated that he has no intention of stopping the war, so he has disqualified himself. That's his prerogative; no one put a gun to his head. His op-ed in Monday's New York Times just removes any lingering doubt about the matter. What Obama proposes is moving the central... Read More