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

It would be easy to read too much into the few statewide races that
were decided last night, but I think it’s fair to say that the results
in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republican gubernatorial candidates
won--in New Jersey’s case knocking off a well-funded Democratic
incumbent--that the results were a blow to the Barack Obama/Rahm
Emanuel strategy of playing to the right, of avoiding confrontation in
Congress and of ignoring the progressive voters whose enthusiasm and
effort back in the 2008 campaign put Obama in office.

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

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 David Swanson, http://dontattackiran.org

The New York Times doesn't mention the pivotal role it played in lying us into a war in Iraq, but it doesn't have to. Everybody knows. On Wednesday, the Times put this article on its front page, and I highly recommend it as an ideal liner for bird cages:

In Dispute With Iran, Path to Iraq Is in Spotlight
By SCOTT SHANE, New York Times

WASHINGTON — To many Americans, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s February 2003 speech to the United Nations on Iraq’s unconventional weapons was powerfully persuasive. It was a dazzling performance, featuring satellite images and intercepts of Iraqi communications, delivered by one of the most trusted figures in public life.

 Corporations have no more place in a democracy than carpenter ants and mold have in the beams of an old barn.

By Dave Lindorff

President Barack Obama has staked his presidency on winning his “necessary” war in Afghanistan. Coming into office, one of his first acts, on Feb. 18, was to boost US troop levels in that country by 17,000, bringing the total number of soldiers and Marines in the country to about 57,000, to which one must also add 74,000 private contractors who are doing jobs normally done by uniformed military, and about 33,000 other soldiers from NATO countries and Australia. That’s 164,000 foreign soldiers fighting against Taliban fighters.

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.