Labour MP George Galloway last night insisted he was innocent after it was revealed a dirty tricks scam was used to frame him for taking money from Saddam Hussein.

President Bush came to Indianapolis to send the message that his tax cut plan will help everyone and not just the wealthy. That's why all those people sitting behind him were instructed on what to wear.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, on the dynamics of history at the end of history, when O'Brien tells Winston: "Always there will be the intoxication of power… Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever."

Busy chasing off Saddam Hussein, the president and vice president had told us that Al Qaeda was spent. "Al Qaeda is on the run," President George W. Bush said last week. "They're not a problem anymore."

Buried in the rubble of Riyadh are some of the Bush administration's basic assumptions: that Al Qaeda was finished, that invading Iraq would bring regional stability, and that a show of American superpower against Saddam would cow terrorists.

"How free should free speech be in a very tough situation like we're in now in Iraq?"

"Petraeus sent the station manager a letter telling him to give fair access to all political parties and censor anti-American messages. Petraeus’s next step, he said, would be to review material before it airs."
mr ed: - well, they did promise to bring us american style democracy... so it appears, again, that the irony organ is failing again, and again - fair access to all except those who dont like us... without batting an eyelid... if only they had some shame...

""Several times recently, one U.S. official said, Osama bin Laden expressed frustration to his lieutenants in Iran that al-Qaida had struck no significant blows as the United States invaded Muslim Iraq. "The fact that his frustration was directed toward those in Iran is interesting," one official said. "
mr ed: great - knight ridder are joining in the game too... who's next? iran or syria?

The legal and political basis for the war in Iraq was thrown into doubt yesterday when Jack Straw declared that uncovering Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction was "not crucially important".

steve weisman from nytimes on CNN: 'the riyahd bombings are very mysterious, we may well never find out what happened.' really??????

In the case of Iraq, with no weapons of mass destruction to speak of, the US plans a war; in the case of North Korea, it offers that country economic and energy aid. What a humiliating difference between contempt for the Arabs and respect for North Korea, an equally grim, and cruel dictatorship.

t's particularly galling that Perle, about as unqualified a person as it is imaginable to be on any subject touching on democracy and justice, should have been an election adviser to Netanyahu's extreme right- wing government during the period 1996-9, in which he counseled the renegade Israeli to scrap any and all peace attempts, to annex the West Bank and Gaza, and try to get rid of as many Palestinians as possible.

America is the world's most avowedly religious country. References to God permeate the national life, from coins to buildings to common forms of speech: in God we trust, God's country, God bless America, and on and on.
All of those things converge around an idea of American rightness, goodness, freedom, economic promise, social advancement that is so ideologically woven into the fabric of daily life that it doesn't even appear to be ideological, but rather a fact of nature. America=good=total loyalty and love.
Patriotism is still the prime American virtue, tied up as it is with religion, belonging, and doing the right thing not just at home but all over the world.
Never has there been so unashamed, if not scandalous, complicity between TV news and the government's rush to war
"Certainly one could argue that...[the neoconservative] approach to cultural literacy is a thinly disguised attempt to inculcate students with a relatively conflict-free, consensual view of history."
we have a major Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, though no such memorial exists either for African-Americans or native Americans, anywhere in the country

The Smithsonian Institution wanted to mount an exhibition on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including showing the actual plane, the Enola Gay, that dropped the only atom bomb in history, a huge outcry in the Congress and among various "patriotic" citizens' groups forced the Smithsonian to cancel the whole thing.
In 1954, because it disapproved the Arbenz presidency (considered communist) in Guatemala, 10 per cent of the population was killed directly under US auspices. Cuba has been under an embargo for 40 years not because it threatens the US -- a tiny, economically depressed island which is hardly a match for the US colossus -- but because Senator Jesse Helms and his Florida colleagues simply repeat "that we want Castro out of there," as if Cuba, or anywhere else for that matter, is supposed to exist at the US's pleasure.

And it would seem to me that to give Osama bin Laden--who has been turned into Moby Dick, he's been made a symbol of all that's evil in the world--a kind of mythological proportion is really playing his game. I think we need to secularize the man. We need to bring him down to the realm of reality. Treat him as a criminal, as a man who is a demagogue, who has unlawfully unleashed violence against innocent people. Punish him accordingly, and don't bring down the world around him and ourselves. 

Anti-Americanism in this context is not based on a hatred of modernity or technology-envy as accredited pundits like Thomas Friedman keep repeating; it is based on a narrative of concrete interventions, specific depredations and, in the cases of the Iraqi people's suffering under US-imposed sanctions and US support for the 34-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, cruel and inhumane policies administered with a stony coldness.
Immense military and economic power such as the US possesses is no guarantee of wisdom or moral vision, particularly when obduracy is thought of as a virtue and exceptionalism believed to be the national destiny.