All hail Sydney Blumenthal, who warned us in the Clinton years of the "vast right-wing conspiracy." He continues to be a brilliant and prescient analyst of the VRWC, which came to power in the Bush regime, got part of its way in the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, and now...

Washington, DC, in the 1980s was called the "murder capital of the world," but that designation now belongs to Baghdad, where the number of people killed since the end of the war is approaching 42,000. The US had hoped to reduce the numbers of troops in the capital, but the...

Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis, William Bonner and Addison Wiggin, John Wiley & Sons, 370 pages

Two hundred years ago, when the United States was a modest commercial republic, the president could take a walk down Pennsylvania Avenue - by himself - and talk to...

So you thought that the US went into Iraq to uproot a dangerous dictator and establish democracy? Well, the US military has taken on a job a bit more difficult than that. It is trying to build an economy, which no state in the history of the world has been...

"Man is the only Patriot. He sets himself apart in his own country, under his own flag, and sneers at the other nations, and keeps multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people's countries, and keep them from grabbing slices of his. And in...

There is something morally creepy about the way the White House responded to the news - released as inconspicuously as possible - that the 2,500th American soldier has died in Iraq.

"It's a number," said White House Press Secretary Tony Snow.

Yes, and so is 5,000, and 10,000, and 15,000....

Fifteen glorious years without a central government in Somalia! It was typically described as a "power vacuum," as if the absence of a taxing, regulating, coercing junta is an unnatural state of affairs, one that cannot and should not last.

Well, now this "vacuum" is being filled, with an Islamic...

Read the interview with this extraordinary man of peace. He talks to an incredulous Soledad O'Brien of CNN on revenge, hate, killing, war, Bush, Saddam, and not celebrating the death of al-Zarqawi, who may have beheaded his son Nick.

The powerful Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA) is under investigation for corruption. It reminds me of my one run-in with him.

Early in the first Clinton administration, I was sitting next to him at lunch, during a conference in the US Capitol. He was blabbing on and on about...

I've always assumed that at least some of the hatred of Wal-Mart is driven by the desire to keep the workers and peasants in their place (see Tory opposition to the Industrial Revolution, for example). Now Wal-Mart is being denounced by Michael Pollan in the New York Times for...

Before eyes turned to the investigation of the US murders of civilians in Haditha, Iraq, and new outrage broke out over the military murder of two women, one of them pregnant, in Mosul, Iraq, there was news pouring out from another outpost of the US empire.

Only last week, Kabul,...

People tell me that Saddam Hussein is a very bad man. Probably he is. Ok, really he is. He is egregiously immoral and ghastly. Should he be put on trial? Can such a trial be fair? This is where it gets complicated.

If all heads of state who commit violent...

This morning I saw an unintentionally ironic bumper sticker: "Remember the Alamo! Stop illegal immigration!"

Mexico welcomed American immigrants into its province of Texas, and offered them land grants, so long as they swore allegiance to Mexico and converted to the Catholic faith.

The Americans, who later led a war...

I'm still proud of supporting George McGovern in 1972 against the war criminal and economic dictator Milhous. But it turns out that McGovern is sound on more than US wars of aggression. Here he is on Wal-Mart's profits:

"The current frenzy over Wal-Mart is instructive. Its size is unprecedented. Yet...

I'm beginning to think that the epithet "consumerism" is just another word for freedom in the marketplace.

It's true that the market is delivering goods, services, and technological advances by leaps, day after day. People claim that they are so inundated with techno advances that they don't want anymore. Say...

It's hard to know which Bush policies - every day, another disaster - will most immortalize this administration. But on this day, in this hour, I'm going to suggest that his name should be forever mud for his catastrophic decision to nationalize airline security after 9-11.

There is war, spending,...

I'm as happy as the next guy to see the latest polls showing that that I, and the next guy, and the guy after him, loathe Bush and his policies. But then I'm also one of those who would tell a pollster that any and all presidents ought to be...

Jacob Heilbrunn, writing in the Washington Monthly, uses various criticisms that leading conservatives have made of Bush to proclaim a new "conservative crackup." In the course of his narrative, he rehearses the same old ho-hum history of postwar American conservatism, tells the same old story of how intriguing it...

The final blow to US agression against Vietnam (which killed 2.5-3 million, not 57,000) was internal military resistance. There were mutinies (employees wanting to change jobs) among the troops in Vietnam and on Navy ships, and that was it. That's why the military resistance to Bush's aggressive wars, and planned...

Before dropping such infernal devices on Iranians and other people who refuse to take US orders, the feds plan to blow up a 700-ton "conventional" bomb near Las Vegas, and are chortling over the mushroom cloud it will emit. It reminds them of the good old days (and maybe...