"The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."
--Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936)

The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival (Jazz Fest 2008) opened on Friday May 25 to a packed park, and the sight of the crowds staking out spots on the racetrack infield signaled that the heart and soul of New Orleans was back.

Newly released U.S. government documents, detailing how Bush administration officials punched legalistic holes in the Geneva Convention’s protections of war captives, stand in stark contrast to the outrage some of the same officials expressed in the first week of the Iraq War when Iraqi TV interviewed several captured American soldiers.

John Yoo and some other Bush administration lawyers who built the legal framework for torture are now out of the U.S. government, but one still holds a Cabinet-level rank – Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

They are not the rich and superrich, nor the politically powerful running the two-party plutocracy, nor the greedy heads of banking and finance companies, and certainly not the media moguls and bloviating pundits.

"Although publicly I continued to ignore the raging anti-war controversy … I knew, however, that after all the protests and the Moratorium [the nationwide protests of October 1969] American public opinion would be seriously divided by any military escalation of the war."
--The Nixon Memoirs

Tuesday’s highly anticipated Congressional testimony by General David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, appeared to be an exercise in futility.

I’m in Shiraz, on the way to Esfahan.

It’s good to get out of gray, smoggy Tehran, one of the least photogenic cities in the world, where black is the new black, from the hejabs on down.

Skip: Man, I can't believe this. They was gonna burn all this shit. All this shit, and a nigger can't even find a job.

Kirby: Well, that's Uncle Sam for you, baby. Money to burn.

--from the movie, Dead Presidents

Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip."
--George Orwell