The War of Drawz

This Truthout piece is quite interesting, if for no other reason than its title, "Gird Your Loins for the Global War on Underwear."

Robert Parry on the New Year

Robert Parry of Consortium News (via Truthout) offers this excellent essay, "What the New Year Demands."  I agree with his assessment - that the progressive movement needs to build media that matches both the right wing and mainstream media, in size, scope, and influence.

Maybe this is the Health Care Bill the President Wanted...

This Truthout Joe Conason op-ed focuses its ire on Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) and his obstructionist activities concerning the Health Care overhaul. What Conason should ask - is a health care bill stripped of most of its progressive measures what President Obama really wanted?

Truthout Asks, Veterans Day or Rulers Day?

In a Truthout op-ed, writer Bob Richards takes a look at the propaganda of Veterans Day. Here, are some highlights:

If you want to thank anyone for your rights and freedoms, thank an activist. No soldier ended segregation in the 1960's. No sailor got women the vote. No National Guardsman got you the 40-hour week or took children off the shop floors or out of the mines. No, they were called out by the states to kill the very people who were fighting for the rights they eventually won for you.

So, here we are at war to get Unocal's dream pipeline route across Afghanistan secured and prop up that ex-Unocal employee's stolen election. Then there's still that war we don't talk about so much anymore. The one that the lie to get us in there changed nearly every day, when the truth may have been as simple as the Decider told us himself, that Saddam tried to kill his daddy, and that he would use that war for his own ends.

I was formerly acquainted with a combat vet who held similar opinions about the celebration of Veterans Day.

Ku Klux Klowns, indeed

Truthout's William Rivers Pitt offers his usual excellent, pithy writing in his essay, Ku Klux Klown. It's about that ridiculous 9/12 rally, anti-tax (really anti-Black President ) protest put together by corporate pimp, Dick Armey, and championed by sobriety trainwreck, Glenn Beck.

Highlights:

Well, nobody said you have to be smart in order to become a hero to the far right. In fact, it helps to be dumber than a sack of hair, if only to match wits with the kind of people who were marching this weekend holding signs that read "Bury Obamacare With Kennedy." Stay classy, GOP.

Frum was being nice, actually, because he knows better than anyone what took place in Washington this weekend. It was a Klan rally minus the bedsheets and torches. These people don't even have enough shame to hide their faces anymore. If more Republicans like Frum don't come forward to denounce such activities from their right flank, that right flank is going to finish the job of taking over the GOP, and hard as it is to believe, this kind of obnoxious craziness is going to seem quaint by comparison to what will be coming next.

George W. Bush's Best Day Ever - The Anniversary

Truthout writer, William Rivers Pitt, takes a look at September 11, 2001 as the best day of former President Bush's life and at how it turned out to be train wreck for practically everyone else in this column. I agree.

Eight months into his presidency, many people were probably betting that Dumya...err...Dubya was a one-term Commander-in-Chief. It took four airplanes to give Bush the shield that would protect him from his political enemies, his deserved fate (marginalization), and, for a long time, criticism. Worse, he gained unprecedented power to wage war abroad and, in some ways, at home.