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“I send my tormentor hurrying hither and thither in the service of my suffering and desire.” – Mason Cooley (d.2002) I have concluded that Americans, who pretend in public to be straitlaced, are in fact rabid masochists addicted to whips, black leather and the application of fists. It turns out that large numbers of people […]

Aljazeera English shows and analyzes a just-released security tape from the Marriott in Islamabad, showing the bomb-laden truck ramming the security perimeter. There were two initial explosions on the truck, probably to prime the big bomb and security personnel were trying to put out the fire on the truck . . .

Bloomberg argues that Saturday’s bombing of the Marriott in Islamabad will likely put pressure on US/ Pakistani relations. The bombing was a clear signal from militants that the Pakistani government must back away from its American alliance. Newly elected president Ali Asaf Zardari gave an address to the parliament in which he called for the […]

3,000 progressives in Cologne clashed Saturday with far rightwing protesters trying to stop the building of a mosque. There are about 3.3 million Muslims in Germany, about 4 percent of the population. The Jewish population of the US is 2%, so this would be as though American rightwingers tried to stop a synagogue from being […]

Guerrillas in Pakistan set off an enormous bomb blast at the Marriott in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad Saturday morning EDT. It left a 30 foot crater and set off a conflagration that was still burning brightly hours after the bombing. Aljazeera English reports on the explosion: The Pakistani military has been bombing the tribal […]

US troops targeting a Sunni Arab guerrilla appear instead to have killed an Iraqi family of 8 in a town 70 mi. north of Baghdad on Friday. Three women were among the dead. AFP reports of Tikrit, ‘Large crowds protested against the US raid after the main weekly Muslim prayers in the city, capital of […]

H t Josh Marshall: John McCain: “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

60 Minutes Interviewed Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad a couple of years ago. They cut some key passages out of the interview. I’ve made the same point at Informed Comment in the past. It is legitimate to decry his positions, and I decry a lot of them. It is not legitimate to misrepresent what he has […]

Newsweek asks if the fundamentalist vigilantes (my term) who hit the US embassy in Sanaa, Yemen included returnees from the fighting in Iraq. If the answer is yes, then it is a refutation of the right-wing US ‘flypaper theory’ and instead a vindication of those who feared a long US military occupation of Iraq would […]