So the Democrats have yet another supporter of aggressive war, oligarchy, authoritarianism and torture in their Senate ranks. Wow, that will certainly shake up the political landscape in Washington! It looks like the promised New Jerusalem of hope and change has well and truly arrived at last. The chattering classes are all, well, a-chatter with the cosmic significance of the switcheroo by the aptly named Arlen Specter from the Republican faction of the imperial court to the Democratic faction. The late-life conversion of this greasy, cadaverous bagman apparently heralds not only a filibuster-proof majority for the Democrats (once they are

Haiti has been a cursed nation throughout its existence. As I noted in a piece in 2004: Exactly two hundred years ago, Haitian slaves overthrew their French masters — the first successful national slave revolt in history. What Spartacus dreamed of doing, the Haitian slaves actually accomplished. It was a tremendous achievement — and the white West has never forgiven them for it. In order to win international recognition for their new country, Haiti was forced to pay “reparations” to the slaveowners – a crushing burden of debt they were still paying off at the end of the 19th century.

(UPDATED BELOW) Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh! — Lady Macbeth Arthur Silber is back, after another long, health-induced hiatus, and, as you might expect, he brings a unique and powerful perspective to bear on the “torture debate.” (Yes, in some far-distant future our much-evolved descendants will marvel — with wonder and revulsion — that our species was once so primitive and barbaric that it actually had “debates” about the practice of inflicting pain and suffering on captive fellow creatures. Or perhaps this puzzled wonderment

Could it really have ended any other way? As the New York Times reports, Barack Obama and the Democratic Establishment are coming down hard and fast to quell any incipient movement toward accountability for the Bush Regime’s torture system. These “leaders” continue to advance the bizarre and bogus argument that the nation has too many “urgent priorities” to bother with following its own laws. Obama told the Democratic poobahs from Congress that a “full inquiry” into the torture system would “steal time and energy from his policy agenda,” the Times reports. But this argument — indeed the entire issue of

A reader writes in about yesterday’s post: There might be another reason [why Obama is not calling for prosecutions on torture]: a desire to win the case that’s built against the former administration and not taint or discredit it by inappropriate pressure to prosecute. As has been widely pointed out, it is not up to Barack Obama to decide when and what to prosecute – and any attempt to do so on his part would be unethical, if not criminal. (It’s the same principle that goes to the heart of what was so desperately corrupt about the Bush Administration’s involvement

Noam Chomsky, among others, has noted how faithfully and thoroughly the corporate American media advances the agenda of the state, achieving a near Pravda-like degree of servitude without any need for the kind of overt, direct control once practiced by Pravda’s Soviet masters. This is done, in large part, unconsciously; that is, most of the practitioners (and all of the owners) of the corporate media share the same assumptions and values of the nation’s ruling elite. They don’t have to be told to believe what the elite believe; they believe it already. Naturally, there are factional rivalries among the elite,

As we all know, the Terror Warriors in the White House (of whatever political stripe) don’t do body counts. They just kill people, make unsupported claims of “clean hits” on “militants,” backtrack a bit later when eyewitness reports confirm extensive civilian casualties, promise “investigations” that kick the PR can way down the road — and carry on killing. But strangely enough, the people who are being killed by these well-wadded, massively protected elites do count how many of their sons and daughters and mothers and fathers are being slaughtered by American ordnance. Imagine that! It’s almost like they are real

“Hope must be grounded in reality; and it must be invested in the right place. When reality gives it the lie, then it must be abandoned.” It was obvious from the moment that Barack Obama appointed Leon Panetta to head the CIA that there was going to be no serious investigation — much less prosecution — of the high crimes of torture committed by the agency at the order of the Bush White House. Panetta, a Clinton retread (who actually began his career in the Nixon administration), has always been a bland, feckless, obedient servant of the Establishment; he has