Shamus Cooke

Some cancer is too aggressive even for chemotherapy. The US political system is infected with such a disease; and we may be witnessing the first death spasms. In a country ravaged by war and economic crisis, with tens of millions of people suffering, politicians are capable of doing absolutely nothing to help ordinary people. The only two “achievements” of the Democrat’s super majority in the Senate — over the course of five months — were an ineffectual stimulus package and a “surge” of troops in Afghanistan.

Now the two party system is reshuffling to pursue a joint mission. Policies that the corporate elite have been planning for decades are in the process of being implemented. The recession is being used as the ultimate excuse to gut Medicare, Social Security, public education and other social services while expanding war, corporate tax breaks and corporate health care.

Typically, the Republicans leave the really dirty work to the Democrats, who enforce pro-corporate policies by exploiting their political capital with labor and community groups — while somehow managing to emerge “the lesser of two evils.” This is why Bill Clinton was left with the task of “reforming” welfare and implementing NAFTA. In regards to “reforming” Social Security, Bush looked into the abyss and got scared; better to let the Democrats play with that fire.

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Chris Floyd

Afghan men gather around bodies of villagers killed in a US NATO attack
in the eastern province of Laghman, Afghanistan, on December 8, 2009.
[There's a news blackout as regards photos from the ongoing massacres,
so we have posted a photo from an earlier US war crime.]

A fresh dispatch from the imperial satrapy of Bactria brings word that the Pentagon has ended the eyeblink-brief "suspension" of one of its super-duper missile systems following the "unfortunate" slaughter of 12 civilians, including five children, in the opening hours of the all-out media blitz -- sorry, the "largest military operation of the Afghan war" -- now being inflicted on the city of Marja.

As you'll recall, after this initial child sacrifice to waft the pleasing smell of innocent blood to great Ares, that he might smile upon the bold Achaeans in their martial endeavor, mighty Agamemnon himself -- now robed in the flesh of General Stanley "Black Ops" McChrystal -- stepped forth before the cameras, and with great show of crocodilian regret, declared that the "errant" missile system would be withdrawn from battle forthwith, until such time as it could be determined why it killed all those civilians and, worst of all, gummed up the glowing press which the Pentagon had painstakingly cultivated during the run-up to the attack.

But as the ever-astute Jason Ditz at Antiwar.com notes, the Pentagon concluded its in-depth investigation of the incident in a matter of hours. What's more, the brass found that not only was there no error whatsoever in the hi-tech death-hurling technology, but also that the whole incident was actually the result of the heroic efforts of a clean-limbed young Leatherneck to save the cowering civilians in his tender care.

Yes, that's right. The Pentagon's story now is that it killed 12 civilians in order to save civilians.

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Marc Sheppard

Newsbusters' Noel Sheppard lets the mainstream media have it for completely ignoring this weekend’s game-changing revelations from Climategate conspirator Phil Jones while jumping all over the ejection of director Kevin Smith from a Southwest Airlines plane for being too fat.

For those who may have taken the three-day weekend off from the blogosphere (and Fox News) -- the BBC released a Q&A and corresponding interview with the embattled erstwhile CRU chief on Friday. In each, the discredited Climategate conspirator revealed a number of surprising insights into his true climate beliefs, the most shocking of which was that 20th-century global warming may not have been unprecedented. As I pointed out in Sunday’s article, Climategate's Phil Jones Confesses to Climate Fraud, as the entire anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory is predicated on correlation with rising CO2 levels, this first-such confession from an IPCC senior scientist is nothing short of earth-shattering.

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Stuart Littlewood

Stuart Littlewood considers the hypocrisy of Britain’s Liberal Democratic Party whose leadership, for the second time running, showed contempt for their own loftily-worded principles by sacking one of the party’s few principled politicians in order to appease the Zionist lobby.

In another blow to British free speech the parliamentarian Baroness Jenny Tonge, a good friend to Palestinians for many years, has been betrayed by her party colleagues and sacked.

Jenny Tonge dared to comment on allegations circulating in the media about Israel harvesting human organs during the emergency rescue operations in Haiti. To prevent these allegations going any further, she said, "the IDF [Israel Defence Force] and the Israeli Medical Association should establish an independent inquiry immediately to clear the names of the team in Haiti.”

The allegations included reports that the former head of Israel’s forensic institute admitted Israeli pathologists harvested organs from dead Palestinians and others without permission but this nauseating practice had ended in the 1990s. Yet Jenny Tonge’s remarks brought a storm of protest from her own colleagues as well as the Zionist lobby. One of them said: "She is misguided to call for any investigation. On this basis, there could be calls for an investigation to discover the ‘truth’ in the the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

"You have to ask yourself why the IDF, notorious for inflicting wholesale death and destruction on impoverished people who can't defend themselves … would suddenly be interested is saving life in Haiti – praiseworthy though such a humanitarian conversion would be."

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Chris Floyd

The photo is from a previous US massacre. More here.

Another day, another mass slaughter of civilians in Afghanistan. This time the cull of "collateral damage" came not from the world-historical agon at Marja, where Anglo-American sahibs are leading a contingent of colonial troops in a heavily hyped, made-for-media operation that blew a household of civilians, including five children, to smithereens in its opening salvos.

No, the new bloodbath occurred many miles away, in Kandahar, after a NATO patrol evidently saw some Afghan civilians going about their own business in their own country. Naturally, this shocking state of affairs was thought to pose a dire threat to the uninvited invaders who have been rampaging around the country for more than eight years -- so, naturally, an airstrike was called in. Five human beings going about their own business in their own country were then blown to bits, and two more were wounded.

The double whammy of bad PR following these unrelated rub-outs has prompted some of the leading lions of Great Britain's armed forces -- worthy heirs to their world-spanning forbears, upon whose military glories the sun, it was said, never set -- to offer some words of wisdom to those to whom they have now passed the White Man's oh-so-heavy, oh-so-unwanted burden of global domination.

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