TomDispatch.com

The Bush administration was evidently desperate before it hit on what was clearly a brilliant scheme: Just look for someone who had a post already so nightmarish, hopeless, and targeted for failure that DNI would look like a dream.

Dropping in on the Apocalypse

"I think perfect objectivity is an unrealistic goal; fairness, however, is not.

The other day I posted a Dahr Jamail piece entitled, Iraq: The Devastation, but another word has recently come to mind that, I suspect, might apply no less aptly to Iraq and other areas where the Bush administration is exerting its muscle. That word is "desolation."

There's an old joke about a meeting between two men, one of whom is an egomaniac. The egomaniac yaks on endlessly about himself, not giving the other man a chance to get in a word. Finally, he stops and says, "But enough about me. What about you? Wh at do you think of me?"

In a Mother Jones magazine essay, Over a Barrel, energy expert Paul Roberts, considering the near-impossibility of creating a sustainable-energy world in any reasonable span of time based only on market forces, speaks of an American "wall of energy denial" and of American consumers who "still share

On the first day of the New Year, while headlines blazed with news of 140,000 or more deaths around the coastal rim of South Asia, I found myself with a small but solitary task.

Most of the acute despair felt in the wake of the U.S. election has faded into general depression or a sense that all the effort, or even any effort, is futile, but I still wonder about the intensity of that gloom. And I'm still an advocate for hope. By Rebecca Solnit

The chilling reality of what Falluja has become is only now seeping out, as the American military continues to block almost all access to the city, whether to reporters, its former residents, or aid groups like the Red Crescent Society. By Michael Schwartz

We do live in a changing world when scientists can gather at the undoubtedly lovely La Fonda Hotel in genuinely lovely Santa Fe, New Mexico, for a "carnivore conservation" conference.

Most non-Iraqi journalists have little choice but to be "embedded," whether in actual U.S. military units or essentially in their hotels.

Colin Powell, the outgoing US secretary of state, was given his marching orders after telling President George W Bush that he wanted greater power to confront Israel over the stalled Middle East peace process.

What follows is a collage put together from the eyewitness accounts of reporters with major newspapers and news services, most of them embedded with U.S. troops. It is meant to be a portrait of Falluja…

In the meantime, back in Bush's Washington, we seem to have drifted out of the Persian Gulf and down the Mekong River into the Land That Time Forgot (but that Americans can never quite get out of their brains) -- a.k.a. Vietnam.

Our ultimate threat, of course, is that those 10,000 soldiers backed by air power and artillery will make an example of Falluja, producing an American version of the Roman solution to Carthage.

How can I not start on a personal note today? Election night was a roller coaster. I had written a piece a day earlier in which I had expressed guarded optimism about the prospects of experiencing 2005 without George Bush.

Let me, following my own roundabout route, suggest some of the factors all you political jockeys and the rest of us election-night couch potatoes might consider as we turn on our television sets.

Looked at realistically Osama bin Laden's intervention in our presidential election was undoubtedly an act of immediate organizational weakness, not strength.

The tone was perhaps set by the sudden appearance of Osama bin Laden, a mass murderer who came across at the same time as a comic-book, caricature villain -- a man whom it would be impossible to take seriously if he had not killed so many people.

What a world! Everyone his own auteur. Everybody from CIA agents and Presidential political consultants to Osama bin Laden directing his own movie or unreality TV show.

For my family and me, the costs of this war are real and not abstract. I wonder if George Bush ever hears these voices. And I wonder, too…just how much are we willing to pay for a gallon of gas?

The question is: How do you speak sense to a people floating offshore from reality in the seas of denial?

Isn't it about time we began to think about how to kick the habit?

China, the last socialist power, is glad to provide slave labor to multinationals; a firm in India fills the tax forms of an American corporation that produces vodka in Peru and then sells it to Polish immigrants who are constructing a British-financed building in Madrid;

So here we are. The price of a barrel of crude oil leapt to $52.02 on the New York Mercantile Exchange yesterday, having breached the $51 level only the day before, and today it briefly cracked $53 on its way to… well, who knows where?

Normally surrounded by blanketing "security," the President's campaign road events -- with their carefully reserved tickets, their choreographed chants and softball questions, their air of private theatrical performances only open to invited (or paying) guests -- have all the easy, repetitive smooth

We know that the President and his companions live in a bubble world. When he travels the foreign peripheries of our planet, for instance, central cities are emptied as he passes through them; and everywhere, from Washington to his campaign events, "security" regularly replaces reality in his life.

Oil production, which Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz once swore would fund the reconstruction of a democratic Iraq, is now crippled and well below prewar levels, while attacks on oil pipelines and facilities have risen sharply

Journalist Jennifer Harper had come across a "solicitation" from the Pentagon's futuristic research arm, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), calling on researchers to develop, among other things, "on-demand, infantry-operated, ultra-precision, beyond line-of-sight lethal and non-l

When we read of the coming election, what we mainly read about is "the horse race."