One Utah

If thousands of people weren’t being killed, this would be funny. Our politicians can’t keep track of America’s many, ever-changing enemies in Iraq. President Bush has never made it very clear who we’re fighting. It’s “a combination of terrorists, elements of former regime criminals and sectarian militias,” he said in October 2006, [...]

President Bush and the rest of the right wing never get tired of telling us that America is hated by religious fanatics who can’t stand the ideas of freedom and democracy. Considering how many right-wingers are religious fanatics themselves, they may be projecting their own intolerance on others.
Although there are a minority who truly [...]

Via DailyKos, Pulitzer Prize winning author Steve Coll speculates that Osama bin Laden (OBL) might be found before the November elections. His reasoning goes like this:

Pakistan’s Musharraf regime believed that their $10 billion aid package might be reduced if they tracked down too many al Qaeda leaders
Key elements of the regime had close ties [...]

The March 20 U.K. Guardian features an Iraq war commentary by former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix that for its trenchant economy could serve as an object lesson for every contributor to this blog.
As Blix says–and he would know–there was NO rational justification for this war EXCEPT the elimination of a brutal [...]

This post is part three in my series on good and evil.
In The Lucifer Effect Philip Zimbardo explores the way in which situational factors play a role in individual behaviors. 
Zimbardo sums up his argument:
“Bad systems” create “bad situations” create “bad apples” create “bad behaviors” even in good people.
The point of course is simple - I [...]

The Stanford Prison Experiment strongly suggests that moral and immoral behavior are hugley influenced by environment. It’s not so much that we change our morals from setting to setting but that the setting in which we function has the power to put our morality into neutral.
The Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by Philip Zimbardo, suggested that in [...]

The hardest thing about being a Democrat these days is that people are always saying there’s no difference between the two major parties in this country of ours. If you say you’re mad at the Republicans for making a mockery of the constitution and giving their illegitimate and foolish “president” the authority to lie us [...]

Remember the Bush administration’s Big-Brotherish Total Information Awareness (TIA) program? It was the brainchild of Admiral John Poindexter, who is probably best known for his part in the Iran-Contra conspiracy. When TIA became public knowledge, it was immediately obvious that everything about it was unconstitutional and even totalitarian. In February of 2003, [...]

Who’s up for The Long War? This is a term first popularized in February 2006 for the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, although its origins appear to date back further. In April 2005, James Jay Carafano, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, co-published a book titled Winning the Long War. [See comments below [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has found out that more that 900,000 people are currently listed as suspected terrorists on the US government’s “do not fly” list, and that number will grow to beyond 1 million by summer.
“Homeland Security’s handling of the watch lists is typical of this administration’s blundering approach to the war [...]

In Harper’s, Scott Horton writes about The Great Guantanamo Puppet Theater. The problem with the military commission trials is that they are really political tribunals controlled by Vice President Dick Cheney. The trials of six “high-value detainees” linked to the attacks on 9/11 are timed to coincide with the 2008 election, and the [...]

Download Countdown Special Comment on FISA: President Bush Is A Liar And A Fascist
Quicktime 7 required
Thanks as always to Norm at OneGoodMove for providing this video.
Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment on today’s Countdown was a scathing rebuke of President Bush for continuing to play the fear card, trying to scare the hell out of [...]