America is a Nation with a mission — and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace — a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman. ~George W. [...]

With a wiser and less duplicitous administration, the U.S. could have left Afghanistan in 2002.

The world looks very much different now than it did 10 years ago.  The lives of every American changed forever that day and in the days that followed.  One transformation to come out of 9-11 was the rise of the new security state of the U.S.A.  The Patriot Act was [...]

There can be no question about the historic importance of 9/11 and how it changed the course of America. There’s an enormous amount to be learned and remembered but there can be a thin line between exploring those events and exploiting the horror of that day just for ratings or other less than altruistic agendas.

Terrorism is defined as, “”The systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.” So is the GOP.

November 27, 2009 Dear Journal, I can’t believe Brett Favre came back for another season. They’re not even going to make the playoffs. Wish someone payed me $20 million to waste their fucking time for 4 months out of the year. Speaking  of wastes of time, Mahir’s monkey totally broke [...]

Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.
~Noam Chomsky

My father, a lifelong Democrat and a fervent union supporter, always maintained that even the Left had its limits. “Go far enough to the Left in your opinions,” he’d always say, “and before long, you’ll find you’re someplace on the Right.” Since then, and more recently, I’ve heard various people [...]

It didn’t take long before the verbal snipers came out to play in the wake of Bin Laden’s death. It wasn’t enough that most of the Republicans, with few exceptions, were crediting the abysmal George W Bush with the end game which came Sunday evening. I wondered how many days’ [...]

The media is failing Americans again by buying into the narrative that there is a real debate if using torture actually helped or did not help track down Osama Bin Laden.  It is simply logically invalid to let the debate continue that Osama Bin Laden was anyway discovered through the [...]

Osama Bin Laden has been killed, reported at this time as being by American forces.

A place for the situations in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria and throughout the Greater Middle East.

Check in to see my full daily updates, and to add your own.

That word doesn’t mean what you think it means. But that’s okay, it can’t be offended by you, because it’s dead.

In 2009, the director of the Northern Idaho Human Rights Education Institute was forced to move from Coeur d’Alene about 35 miles west to Spokane because white supremacists kept hassling her. Then in Spokane, she found a noose on her lawn.

Watch President Obama and Sarah Palin go toe to toe with each other in their first debate!

“We want you all to know there will be no screening of any passengers today, or any other day for that matter.”

There was a major gasp that went through the crowd laced with whispered variations of the popular question phrase …..What the?

Christian Dominionism kills. It’s just a mater of time who will be next.

I was chosen for jury duty on September 10.   The rest  of the prospective jurors were allowed to leave and resume their lives and for some of them, I guess, their jobs in the nearby World Trade Center.  Having to submit to the inevitability of jury duty, I left  the [...]

As a follow-up to Hate in America, did anyone see the DKos diary on the group in Texas called Repent Amarillo? http://www.texasobserver.org/dateline/he-who-casts-the-first-stone What’s next for Repent? They’ve posted a “Warfare Map” on the group’s Web site. The map includes establishments like gay bars, strip clubs and porn shops, but also [...]

The Southern Poverty Law Center counted 926 active hate groups in the U.S. in 2008—that’s a 54% rise since 2000.  And those are only groups, lone wolves—no one knows how many. Statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation report the incidence of hate crimes showed an eight percent increase between [...]

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani has been the talk of the politicos all day after his appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America. The man who Joe Biden famously said is known for “a noun, a verb and 9/11″ seems to have forgotten about 9/11. Giuliani made the same [...]

 It would appear that the “Powers To Be” have just been waiting for the chance to implement the mandatory use of  Full Body Scanners at every major Airport… Can’t you just picture Dick Cheney making this statement to all the “spooks in the bunker”, ” All we need is one lonely, impressionable [...]

We have come far enough from the Christmas attack to start to draw some conclusions.   For this discussion, I will not assume that there was any deliberate effort to stitch up Obama.    I am coming to the conclusion that this was a classic and not amazing example of turf warfare [...]

YEMEN – The United States and the United Kingdom have both decided to close their embassies given current intelligence regarding al-Qaida’s activity in the area. The Sunday morning programs seem to indicate that Yemen will become a stronger focus of the President Obama’s efforts to fight terrorism. In what ways [...]

In perusing the headlines at HP, I stumbled upon a very interesting article by Congressman Eric Massa of New York. Apparently, the most recent personal attack on President Obama by a certain former vice-president has finally provoked a strong response from a Democrat. In the article, he also cites Senator [...]