By Dave Lindorff

If you are sitting in class taking a test, and you’ve chosen to sit
amongst your bone-headed, slacker friends, don’t turn to them for help
when you can’t figure out of any of the answers. They may all tell you
the same thing, but they’ll all be wrong.

By Dave Lindorff

With word being leaked out over the weekend that our Nobel Peace
Prize President is close to announcing plans to escalate the US troop
level in the Afghanistan War by 50%, we are about to have perhaps the
ultimate of ironies—a president announcing a big step-up in American
war-making on November 11, the day known around much of the Western
world as Armistice Day.

By Dave Lindorff

Country Joe McDonald
said it best in his iconic "Fixin' to Die" Rag: "Oh, it's one, two,
three, what are we fightin' for? Don't ask me. I don't give a damn." In
fact, we were fighting for nothing in Vietnam. It was a war that
started out because the US didn't want the Commies to win a battle in
the so-called Cold War, and even though it was on the farthest side of
the world, in a poor nation of peasants, even though they had been
struggling to throw off colonialism for years and we had simply become
the new colonists, no president dared to admit the obvious--we had no
business being there, and all the killing and dying had no point.

By Dave Lindorff

The Nuclear Regulator Commission will be holding hearings tomorrow
and Wednesday in Hawaii on an application by the US Army for a permit
to have depleted uranium at its Pohakuloa Training Area, a vast stretch
of flat land in what’s called the “saddle” between the sacred mountains
of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea on Hawaii’s Big Island, and at the Schofield
Barracks on the island of Oahu. In fact, what the Army is asking for is
a permit to leave in place the DU left over from years of test firing
of M101 mortar “spotting rounds,” that each contained close to half a
pound of depleted uranium (DU). The Army, which originally denied that
any DU weapons had been used at either location, now says that as many
as 2000 rounds of M101 DU mortars might have been fired at Pohakuloa
alone.

But that’s only a small part of the story.

By Dave Lindorff

How absurd is it that we have the government on the one hand
pulling back from using a hollowed out mountain in Nevada to store
nuclear waste because of a fear (legitimate I grant) that hundreds or
thousands of years hence, some earthquake or other catastrophe could
cause the stored waste to leak into the water table, while on the other
hand we have this same government deliberately taking some of the most
dangerous waste--the actual uranium from the used fuel rods--and
putting it into bombs, shells and bullets to be splattered and burned
all across the landscape?

By Dave Lindorff

The horrors of the US Agent Orange defoliation campaign in Vietnam, about which I wrote on Oct. 15,
could ultimately be dwarfed by the horrors caused by the depleted
uranium weapons which the US began using in the 1991 Gulf War (300
tons), and which it has used much more extensively--and in more urban,
populated areas--in the Iraq War and the now intensifying Afghanistan
War.

By Dave Lindorff

On Oct. 13, the New York Times ran a news story headlined
“Door Opens to Health Claims Tied to Agent Orange,” which was sure to
be good news to many American veterans of the Indochina War. It
reported that 38 years after the Pentagon ceased spreading the deadly
dioxin-laced herbicide/defoliant over much of South Vietnam, it was
acknowledging what veterans have long claimed: in addition to 13
ailments already traced to exposure to the chemical, it was also
responsible for three more dread diseases—Parkinson’s, ischemic heart
disease and hairy-cell leukemia.

Under a new policy adopted by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, the VA
will now start providing free care to any of the 2.1 million
Vietnam-era veterans who can show that they might have been hurt by
exposure to Agent Orange.

By Dave Lindorff

It’s not as much of a travesty as when Henry Kissinger, a war criminal of the first order who was an architect of the latter stages of the Indochina War, and was personally responsible for the slaughter of well over a million innocent people, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, while that war was still raging, but the awarding of the latest Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama is travesty enough.

We’re talking about a man whose practically first act upon taking office early this year was to escalate the ugly and pointless war in Afghanistan with the addition of some 20,000 troops, and who, even as the Nobel committee was discussing his award, was meeting with his military and political advisors to consider expanding that war even further, both in Afghanistan and across the border into Pakistan.

By Dave Lindorff

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party
and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly
bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and
ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party,
shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the
American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who
thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for
progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip
of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.

By Dave Lindorff

President Barack Obama, referring to the violent attacks on
protesters against the controversial election results in Iran’s
just-completed presidential election, this week lectured Iran’s
government, saying, “Peaceful dissent should never be subject to
violence.”

Referring to the tens and hundreds of thousands of frustrated and
angry Iranians who have taken to the streets accusing Iranian
authorities of rigging the election in favor of incumbent President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Obama said that “the Iranian people and their
voices should be heard and respected."

But there is a certain hypocrisy going on here.