"I offered up my innocence/I got repaid with scorn" — Bob Dylan Scott Horton at Harper’s points out two recent cases that underline a central tenet of perhaps the the most powerful and pervasive factions in America’s judicial history: the "movement conservatives" who largely congregate in the Federalist Society, and whose god and high priest is the radical extremist and torture apologist, Antonin Scalia. And what is that central tenet? That the need of the state to put its citizens to death outweighs and overrules the actual innocence of wrongfully convicted individuals. The first cast Horton considers is "the appeal

And they came over unto the other side of the sea, into the country of the Gadarenes. And when he was come out of the ship, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no, not with chains… [Jesus] said unto him, Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit. And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many. And he besought him much that he would not send them

In that august forum of serious, respectable conservatism, “The Corner,” Mark “Mandingo” Steyn has responded to the post here yesterday taking him and his fellow Islamophobes to task for the “psychosexual panic” they evince in the face of their self-concocted vision of a “takeover” of Europe by prodigiously breeding Muslims. It goes without saying that Steyn (and a few of his fanboys in the comments section here) make no genuine reply to the substance of the piece, which drew heavily on a long, detailed essay on Islamophobia by Pankaj Mishra in the Guardian. Instead, Mandingo comes up with what he

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post dealing with one of Mark Steyn’s hate tracts about the Muslim “takeover” of Europe. Steyn, like his ardent admirer Martin Amis, displays a remarkably transparent psychosexual panic at the thought of big Muslim bucks breeding holy warriors to cast the white man down. (As an American Southerner, I am all too familiar with this “Mandingo Syndrome.”) Oddly enough, of all the articles I’ve written over the years, the Steyn piece has produced the longest-lasting reaction. To this day, I still get hate mail and indignant comments from Steyn’s little sycophants,

Not this, by no means, do I bid you do, but if you have an idle moment, you might check out my interview with Scott Horton on Antiwar.com. I must warn you that I was not on top of my rather meager game during the conversation — transatlantic logistics mean that I usually have to talk to Scott at the extremities of exhaustion and minimal brain function — but I do eventually stammer out a couple of points that resemble coherence. Anyway, as they say, got live if you want it, here.    

Looks like the "Good War" in Afghanistan is morphing even more directly into the "Drug War" that the U.S. government has been waging all over the world — and especially against its own people — for almost 40 years now, with all the attendant aggrandizement of authoritarian powers and degradation of civil liberties and human rights. As The Times reports, and Pentagon brass confirmed, the "continuity government" of the Obama Administration has drawn up yet another "hit list" of people to be arbitrarily assassinated: 50 "drug lords" allegedly associated with the Taliban. No doubt the many drug lords associated with

There is apparently no path blazed by George W. Bush that Barack Obama will not eagerly follow. Surges, assassinations, indefinite detention, defense of torture, senseless wars and rampant militarism — in just a few short months, we’ve seen it all. To this dismaying record of complicity and continuity, we can add an increasing direct involvement in the horrific, hydra-headed conflict in Somalia, whose latest round of fiery hell was instigated by the American-backed invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia in late 2006. Under Bush, U.S. forces were deeply and directly enmeshed in the murderous action, dropping bombs on fleeing refugees, "renditioning"

Two giants of North and South meet, live, chaotic, in the wind: Bob Dylan does Buddy Holly, in a chant of joy and defiance in the face of the inevitable triumph of death and decay: Duluth, Minnesota, 1999.  

Who could possibly have suspected this? A Beltway-wired mercenary company hired by the American government to act as freebooting muscle in the war of aggression against Iraq has been accused — in sworn affidavits from company insiders — of operating a murder and gun-running racket in order to push its hard-right owner’s religious extremism. Can such a thing even be contemplated? Why, the next thing you know, they’ll be telling us that good, clean-limbed, all-American agents used KGB-derived torture tactics against helpless captives or something! And yet, incredible as it may seem, insiders from the company once known as Blackwater

We have often talked here about the American gulag — not the far-flung prisons and "intense interrogation" chambers of the global militarist empire, where tens of thousands of captives languish, often without the slightest pretense of even a modicum of rights or legal process — but the countless human holding pens that glut the highways and byways of the sacred Homeland itself, where not thousands but literally millions of people are incarcerated in a brutal system of retribution, abuse and moral atrocity: a system increasingly geared to corporate profit; a seedbed and training ground for gangs and extremists; a breaker