By Robert Fisk —It all depends on whether criminals are our friends or our enemies, or whether we'll get their wealth more easily if they are out of the way.
Michele Bachmann’s press secretary said the candidate was obviously speaking in jest when she attributed the recent earthquake and storm afflicting the East to an angry God. Well, as long as she was only joking about events that killed at least 35 people. ....
Lady Gaga sang her opening number at Sunday’s Video Music Awards in drag, confusing the hell out of a number of stars in attendance, including Britney Spears, who, mouth agape, looked like she had just walked in on her parents.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke confirmed the obvious in a news conference this week: The federal debt limit and the summer scuffle over what to do about it strained the nation’s economy. But he failed to mention how the Fed might assist in the creation of jobs for down-and-out Americans. Elsewhere, presidential candidate Rick Perry surged ahead in the polls and the reading public braced for the release of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s memoir. (more)
After England’s summer of unrest, Billy Bragg, folk- and punk-rock icon of the British protesting classes, recalls the musicians who politicized him after London’s 1976 Notting Hill riots and summons a new generation of artists to raise their voices against social and political convention. (more)
The original “Brighton Rock” is so good—in its dank and sometimes almost unwatchable way—that it obviates a remake. But that never stopped anyone, did it?
The struggle for the serious study and appreciation of literature continues in our society, where enormous emphasis has been placed on the “practical” disciplines of math and science, and specialized academics more and more produce arcane, overtly politicized work that the public seems to find joyless and irrelevant. (more)
Mike Rose notes that no one in power is asking fundamental questions about the purpose of education and whether much-hyped reforms might do more harm than good.
President Obama’s promised jobs plan needs to be unrealistic and unreasonable, at the very least. If he can crank it all the way up to unimaginable, that would be even better.
The trolls have gamed the system. There is no economic, political or environmental reform that can be implemented to impede the march of the corporate state.
It all depends, I think, on whether criminals are our friends (Stalin at the time) or our enemies (Hitler and his fellow Nazis), whether they have their future uses (the Japanese emperor) or whether we’ll get their wealth more easily if they are out of the way (Saddam and Gadhafi).
Our one-woman panel prepares in good spirit to hand out the Equal Rites Awards to all those who did their best to do the worst for women in the past year. The envelopes please.
Today, many reject the fact that black people typically face bigger obstacles to economic and political success than whites. Instead, they insist that whites are oppressed.
Near the beginning of the year, WikiLeaks released a collection of U.S. State Department documents that inadvertently contained the names of confidential sources, and the world just now appears to be noticing. (more)
By an estimate its co-chairs call conservative, the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting has found that the government wasted $30 billion on the use of private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. The co-chairs, writing in The Washington Post, say that number could double. (more)
Correction: Back in 2007, a Russian official announced a scheme to build an underwater rail system linking Siberia to Alaska. Such a railway would require the longest tunnel ever built and somewhere around $94 billion (by one estimate). More than four years later, the transcontinental railway was in the news again. (more)
Moammar Gadhafi’s wife, two sons, a daughter, and a number of grandchildren escaped Libyan rebels and entered Algeria on Monday, according to the Algerian Foreign Ministry. His location, as well as the whereabouts of his other sons, remain unknown. (more)
While New York City escaped the worst of Tropical Storm Irene, much of Vermont did not. The state saw bridges washed away, roads battered and power lines downed in the midst of what officials say is the worst flooding in more than 80 years. (more)
In the long wake of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, New York state has scrapped a controversial $27 million deal between Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation subsidiary and the state’s Education Department. (more)
For 37 years the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has offered no official, scientific report on the safety of triclosan, a dubious anti-microbial agent found in everything from toys to toothpaste. (more)
Japan has already burned through five prime ministers in five years, with a sixth, Yoshihiko Noda, expected to take over from Naoto Kan on Tuesday. Kan was forced to resign Friday because of dissatisfaction with his response to the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the country. (more)
Bachmann Blames Deadly Natural Disasters on God’s Wrath
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