“Wait a minute! Wait a minute! I figured this out. I know what’s wrong with what we’ve done in Iraq. We’ve been following time as it goes forward. What a classic mistake. Linear time is so pre-9/11.” — JON STEWART Well, it’s not even Friday yet, but if anything good has come out of this week it’s that I’m now four-fifths of the way through grieving over the end of the Iraq war. I mean come on! A little sympathy is in order here. It’s bad enough...

“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.” — Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC (1933) There inevitably are charges of American empire building in the wake of the sweetheart deal between the U.S. and Iraq under which the abjectly corrupt Baghdad government gets a long-term...

Bush and Al-Maliki Do the Deal I feel like the last guy in the room to get a bad joke this morning in the wake of announcements in Baghdad and Iraq that there is a quid pro quo deal in which the U.S. will babysit the Shiite-dominated Al-Maliki regime indefinitely in return for giving U.S. entrepreneurs first crack at Iraq’s riches, which lest there be any doubt are its vast untapped oil reserves and not figs or palm-frond chachkes. The arrangement carries the weighty title of a “Declaration...

“Big Al” Maliki And so in the end, a war that has taken the lives of nearly 4,000 Americans and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, further destabilized the Middle East, provided one-stop shopping for fledgling terrorists and sullied the legacy of an American president ends not with a bang or a whimper – but with a business deal that will ensure that George Bush’s Forever War is just that. That is the substance of reports the Baghdad government, seeking protection against...

Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott will become the sixth Republican senator to announce that he is stepping down in this election cycle if reports of his resignation are true. The Mississippian’s term doesn’t expire until 2012 and Republican Governor Haley Barbour would have to appoint a replacement to serve before a special election is held. We’ll probably know soon enough why Lott is bailing out, but there are pretty much only three scenarios: * The diabolical shape of the GOP...

One test of the greatness of a singer-songwriter is whether and how successfully their catalogue is covered by other musicians. By that token, Joni Mitchell is a goddess. But then we already knew that, didn’t we? As I have traveled around the jazz radio webcast dial in recent weeks, I have heard selections from Mitchell‘s extraordinary songbook covered by Judy Niemack, Cleo Laine and Diane Krall, among other great jazz vocalists, and practically wept at the beauty of Laine’s cover...

There is much to find fault with the cable television news networks, but it has puzzled me how many bloggers waste their time — and bandwidth — endlessly harping about the perceived shortcomings and biases of CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. God knows that they have plenty of both, but aside from occasionally giving CNN the back of my hand over its fascination with stories on missing blondes to the exclusion of arguably more important matters, I’ve got better things to blog about. But...

(Swaraaj earlier posted a great roundup on the sea change in Australian politics. Here’s my take.) The winning candidate campaigned on a platform of new leadership to address voters’ concerns about the environment, health and education. As one of his first acts as national leader he will push for the ratification of the Kyoto agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and negotiate the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. President-elect Barack Obama in November 2008? Nah. It’s Kevin...

How about that Thanksgiving Eve bombshell? Former presidential press secretary Scott McClellan reveals in a forthcoming book that he was lied to in 2003 when he falsely assured us that nobody in the White House had leaked Valerie Plame’s confidential CIA status in retaliation for husband Joseph Wilson’s criticism of George Bush’s rationales for the Iraq war. You may recall that the presidential mouthpiece went so far as to tell the press that he had checked with Scooter Libby and...

DSU (top) angles for upset; UD for championship It is the biggest sporting event in little Delaware since the Nanticoke tribe played the Lenni Lenape tribe in lacrosse. Or something. Delaware is the only state where the major universities have never played each other in football, but that will change today when the University of Delaware finally faces off against Delaware State University in the first round of the NCAA’s Division I Football Championship Series. UD, founded in 1743, offers...

President Bush pardons the National Thanksgiving Turkey in the White House Rose Garden. You can surely do better than that. What caption would you write for this photo?

The classic 1971 live version of “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” the Allman Brothers’ wonderful mini symphony within a ballad, opens with a gently swinging Dickey Betts guitar solo evocative of a smoke-filled jazz club late at night. As Betts slowly tricks out the song’s primary theme, he is joined by the creamy signature slide sound of Duane Allman’s guitar. Allman at first plays behind Betts but they soon join in unison as the tempo picks up and gallops into a quasi-Latin...

Mainstream news media coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign is turning out to once again be the same dreary affair that it is every four years: The candidates manipulate the media. The media obliges and manipulates back. There are recurring story lines that bear only coincidental resemblance to what’s really going on. The focus is almost entirely on the horserace and rarely on the issues. And there is far too little introspection or self criticism. There is one important difference this...

There are bound to be unintended – and unpleasant – consequences when a political party’s congressional strategy is predicated on gridlock. So it is with the Republicans, who are forcing procedural votes even on inconsequential legislation and are filibustering a Democratic-sponsored war funding bill. Got that? The Republicans are using a starve-the-troops tactic that they have accused those unpatriotic Democrats of employing. Well, a number of Republicans are now saying that they are...

For a movie that just opened yesterday in New York and a few other major cities, veteran director Brian De Palma’s Redacted already has generated powerful feelings just like the Iraq war it depicts. This movie was a prizewinner in Venice and received decidedly mixed reviews at festivals in Telluride, Toronto and New York. I myself haven’t seen a De Palma movie in years that I thought was worth spilling popcorn over, but I can’t pass judgment on Redacted until it goes into national...

Yes, Virginia, There Still Is a War When it comes to Iraq these days, an arrogant President Bush seems more out of touch than ever, the war seems to be fading from the consciousness of an increasingly apathetic American public faster than ever, and the whole reason for the surge – that improved security would create the breathing room for Iraqi factions to kiss and make up – is being undercut more than ever by the overweaning intransigence of the Baghdad government. It has fallen to military...

When Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency on November 3, he said it was to deal with terrorists. But nearly two weeks later he not only has not dealt with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, he has allowed the Taliban to push closer to Islamabad as they take over one district after another in yet another tragic consequence of the Bush administration starving the War on Terror in South Asia to feed the war in Iraq. Military blogger Bill Roggio, who has been on top of a story that...

Perhaps no one knows when O.J. Simpson hit bottom — probably not even The Juice himself — but it probably occurred sometime in the run-up to the 1994 murders of his former wife and her friend during a cocaine-fueled binge or a fit of jealousy. In any event, it is sadly obvious that the former football star, advertising pitchman and not-bad Hollywood actor, whose good looks have faded at age 60, has been crawling along the bottom since then. As extraordinary as it seems, he now faces...

As I noted the other day, there is an epidemic of lazy thinking abroad in the land with too many politicians, pundits and bloggers pretty much giving the White House a free pass because of the dopey notion that everything will be better with a new president. This attitude is astonishingly short-sighted when one considers that if the 2008 election were held tomorrow, in all likelihood the winner would be either Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani. This raises the prospect that the successor to the lousiest...

Copland composes by candlelight (1946) The great American composer Aaron Copland probably did more than anyone to liberate classical music from its European roots. As a classically-trained composer, Copland’s embrace of popular music was not unprecedented, but the way that he integrated folk music and jazz into his compositions certainly was. No matter how often I hear his Pulitzer Prize-winning scores from Agnes DeMille‘s “Rodeo” (1942) and Martha Graham‘s “Appalachian...