Ten years after the 9/11 catastrophe, the Bush administration cover-up of why the terrorist attacks were carried out despite the White House, CIA and FBI being repeatedly warned of them still holds. Not only has the final word not come out about this malfeasance of enormous and arguably criminal proportions, hardly any word about it has. The mainstream media has been complicitous in ignoring this cover-up and ancillary efforts to hide the truth, which is not to be confused with the rantings...

Christine O’Donnell’s 15 minutes of fame is officially over. Politico reports that the Tea Party darling, who deftly blew a guaranteed Republican Senate seat pick-up in Delaware last November, has been stricken from the guest list at an Iowa event being headlined by Sarah Palin, whose 15 minutes of fame has been extended but also will soon expire. Fame, of course, can be fleeting for even the most stalwart of politicians and celebrities, but O’Donnell’s flameout is...

The American woodchuck is more properly known as the groundhog (or even more properly as Marmota monax), but by any name is a big bellied pest with an insatiable appetite for everything and anything in the backyard garden. Except perhaps for hot peppers. Don’t try telling me that they’re cute. I’ve seen ‘chucks who probably weighed as much as 30 pounds, although half that weight is the norm. Come to think of it, Norm on Cheers looked a bit like the ‘chuck who used...

And so Irene passes into history having been an unusual hurricane that fortunately did not live up to its potential. Meteorologists were predicting a storm of the century, but by the time Irene hit the metropolitan New York area it more resembled, in the words of one wag, an overweight jogger. There were a number of explanations for this, but the most significant is that the storm — while immense and a huge rainmaker that took at least 16 lives in six states — failed to undergo an...

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is being updated once or twice more tonight. A newer post on the storm will appear Saturday. The latest news at 6:50 pst: Two million have been evacuated to escape possible dnger from swiftly-approaching Hurricane Irene so far: Hurricane Irene caused extraordinary disruption Friday as it zeroed in for a catastrophic run up the Eastern Seaboard. More than 2 million people were ordered to move to safer places, and New York announced plans to shut down its entire network...

Forty-eight years ago this Sunday and in weather far more auspicious than the hurricane-driven winds and rain expected to lash the nation’s capital, the 34-year-old son of a Georgia preacher, his back to the Lincoln Memorial, delivered a 17-minute speech to 200,000 people gathered around the Reflecting Pool that was not just the defining moment of the civil rights movement but the greatest speech given by an American since the Gettysburg Address a century earlier. And there has been none...

One of my fondest childhood memories is low-crawling across the front yard of my family home with my father as Hurricane Hazel bore down on us. It was October 1954, I was seven years old and it was all a lark. Never mind that Hazel, a Category 4 monster, took 95 lives in the U.S. in an era when hazardous weather alerts were primitive and another 81 lives in Canada as a rare extratropical storm. Then there was Hurricane Agnes in 1972, a rare June hurricane that was downgraded to a tropical storm...

To the old adage that the only things certain in life are death and taxes can now be added a third certainty: That the Republican Party always manages to outdo itself when it comes to crazy, out-of-the mainstream ideas. How else to explain that influential members of the anti-tax party are now proposing to: * Tax the poor because, you know, they’re a bunch of loafers and need to pay their fair share, too. * Increase payroll taxes for middle-class families earning $50,000 or more. No family...

There is a compulsion among analysts to compare present day wars with the wars of yore, and more often than not they get more wrong than right. That was the case with comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq and it yet again is the case with the comparisons between Iraq and Libya. The compulsion this time around is especially strong because the aim of both wars was to take out strongmen — in Iraq the brutal Saddam Hussein and in Libya the somewhat less despotic Moamar el-Qaddafi, the primary...

Where is Tibet? That depends upon which Tibet you are talking about. Is it the Tibet that the Chinese occupiers refer to as the Tibet Autonomous Region? Is it the larger ethnographic Tibet that share the same language? Or is it the larger still Tibet of yore that overlaps with four Chinese provinces and four other Himalayan kingdoms? And while we’re at it, was Tibet the spiritual paradise that Hollywood movies evoke before the Chinese liberation or occupation or whatever you believe...

It is gratifying that another Middle Eastern henchman appears about to get his just desserts, and that despite extensive U.S. involvement in the NATO mission not a single American life has been lost in the civil war. (How about them apples, Michele Bachmann? Time to retract your statement that President Obama “is not on our side” because the U.S. intervened? Of course you won’t.) But let’s face it, defeating Qaddafi’s army will have been the easy part. The hard part...

A NATURAL GAS WELL NEAR DIMOCK, PENNSYLVANIA The states of Pennsylvania and New York share more than a common border. Areas of both lie atop an immense shale formation and energy companies are hard at work extracting natural gas from the formation through the use of a controversial method known as fracking, which is an environmental disaster waiting to happen. Yet despite the potential risks, Pennsylvania regulatory and environmental authorities who answer to Governor Tom Corbitt have...

With all the subtlety of a cartoon anvil hurtling down on Wile E. Coyote, it has dawned on Karl Rove and what is left of the mainstream Republican leadership that unless Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann can be muscled aside, President Obama could cakewalk to a second term despite a sucky economy. Even if Mitt Romney, the one-time putative front runner, grows a spine and begins acting presidential, he will remain unacceptable to the Tea Party cum Christianist base, which leaves who? Paul Ryan...

I have written early and often that the Tea Party will be a flash in the pan and its toxic brand of politics will never appeal to a larger constituency while at the same time dragging the Republican Party further into the electoral wilderness. Several recent polls make my point: The Tea Party’s negatives have more than doubled — in one poll from 18 to 40 percent in 14 months. In another, voters were asked their opinion of 24 groups and the Tea Party polled worse than “Muslims”...

PALIN CAME, SAW, BUT DIDN’T CONQUER Sarah Palin has always been a little too smart for her own good, which is to say that she believes that she has more on the ball than anyone else when it comes to making the decisions that determine the course of her political career. This explains why she openly resented the handlers dispatched by the people running John McCain’s 2008 campaign to help manage her end of things. This explains why she has persisted in surrounding herself with sycophants...

THE PRESIDENT AT A TOWN HALL MEETING IN MINNESOTA As I noted here, the Republicans who show up at Iowa’s quadrennial straw polls and caucuses are about as representative of American voters in general as two-headed cows are representative of cows in general. Furthermore, only two of the six candidates who have won the straw poll in the last 20 years have become the Republican nominee, and the record of caucus winners is similarly scanty. And so after two weeks of campaigning and debating in...

I’ll begin this essay by declaring that it is my view that President Obama has not been the major disappointment that has left many liberals and blacks shaking their heads. I’ll also note that given the watershed 2008 election and the eight dark years before it, our expectations for the next four were bound to be much too high. Yet I share some of that sense of disappointment. While acknowledging the realities of the time in which Obama governs — an economic crisis that...

It takes balls to execute an innocent man ~ PERRY SUPPORTER When Barry Goldwater, in accepting the 1964 Republican presidential nomination declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” the conservatism he represented bore scant resemblance to the extremism of 2012 GOP wannabes Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, whose singular talent appears to be really pissing off people about other people. Bachmann, of course, is a known quantity whose record of nuttiness pretty much...

The upshot of the Bush Torture Regime — the systematic use of Nazi-like interrogation techniques against foes and friends like — has been deeply dissatisfying. The mainstream news media has been studiously uncurious about the criminal behavior of top administration officials and their lackies, and none have been held accountable. But that may be about to change. A federal district court judge in Washington, D.C., ruled earlier this month that a lawsuit against former Defense Secretary...

I haven’t invested in stocks since the dot com bubble burst in March 2000 and my 401(k) was pretty much wiped out even though my investments were toward the conservative side. When the dust had settled, I was out about $60,000, a not inconsiderable sum that would have come in handy when it came time to retire in 2009. Well, I’m still working. Nearly half of American households owned stocks in 2000, but that number has headed steadily south as the wealthiest Americans consolidate their...

There is a wonderful spring-fed swimming pool a short drive from our mountain retreat that even during the dog days of summer is refreshingly cool. The regulars who congregate there include a half dozen folks in their seventies and eighties. Most are widows. The only guy is a retired Air Force fighter pilot and Vietnam veteran. The gals include two retired school teachers and a librarian. All are moderates, all vote for Democrats and Republicans pretty much in equal measure, and all are on fixed...

There were some very insightful comments in response to Dr. E’s post on Hiroshima and my earlier offering. Dr. E suggested that interested readers acquaint themselves with the Hiroshima Maidens, while I would recommend these books, all of which I have read: The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (Gar Alperovitz) Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician (Michihiko Hachiya) Hiroshima (John Hersey) Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (Robert Jay Lifton) The Making of the Atomic Bomb...

(PORTIONS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN AUGUST 2007) Shinichi Tetsutani loved to ride his beloved tricycle outside his house in Higashi-Hakushima-Cho, a neighborhood in the Japanese port city of Hiroshima. Shin-chan, as his family affectionately called the three-year-old, was doing just that on the morning of August 6, 1945 when there was a brilliant flash in the sky. The boy was about a quarter mile from the hypocenter of the detonation of the first nuclear weapon to be used in anger, the...

It is easy to forget that there are people whose lives don’t include cable television and shopping at malls. And that 11 years after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, South Africa might as well be in another solar system as far as most Americans are concerned. These are among my motivations for publishing Letter From the Eastern Cape, a regular feature debuting today at my blog. The author is Susan Winters Cook, a photojournalist and humanitarian who has lived in the Eastern Cape...

Although the links between the excruciatingly slow recovery from the Bush Recession and the record-high federal budget deficit are to an extent incidental, it is sadly ironic that an upshot of the deficit cap compromise hammered out on Sunday is that less money will be invested in the economy, which is to say the nation’s future prosperity, and the recovery could bog down even more. While the Republican hard heads who forced a compromise in which President Obama and Democrats can take...