Month: December 2009

Source: Truthdig

Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama-as if he reads them-asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision. read more

Source: Mother Jones 

President Barack Obama is surging a war to end it.

That’s how he’s selling his decision to expand the mess in Afghanistan he inherited from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. In a much-anticipated speech Tuesday night that followed weeks of high-level deliberations, Obama announced what had already been purposefully leaked by the White House: that he has ordered another 30,000 American soldiers to Afghanistan. This deployment-in keeping with the request put to him by General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and NATO troops-will raise the total number of US troops to nearly 100,000 by next summer, ten times the force level in 2003. But speaking before an auditorium of cadets at West Point, Obama contended that the boost in troops will be temporary, a means to "create the conditions for the United States to transfer responsibility to the Afghans" for securing their own country and, most important, keeping the Taliban and al Qaeda at bay. read more

Source: IPS News

(IPS) – On a sunny Sunday afternoon in Washington, DC’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, about 50 protestors lined up outside a polling station where voting was taking place to help select the next leader of a country almost 3,000 kilometres away.