There is a lot of violence in the world, a lot of physical assault and murder, and a lot of hateful abuse.
Many times folks on the left treat a statement like that as a picture of something far away, something going on in countries ruined by imperialism and corporate rapaciousness and other sinister institutional evils. […]

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The most disturbing aspect of the sorry spectacle of President Bush’s last State Of The Union Address —his airbrushed rendering of his Mideast misadventure. Where it concerned the situation in Iraq the president’s address wasn’t any realistic accounting of the state of affairs. It was a delusional display of false premises and distorted fantasy.

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AFP ran a very amusing story today about Al Gore and Bono at the World Economic Forum in Davos, discussing Global Warming.

Apparently, Bono has confessed that “having climate campaigner Al Gore round to your house is to open yourself to a self-flagellating guilt trip.”

Sphere: Related Content

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If you want to see the Cold War as chapter behind us (and that is arguable), the Soviet conflict in Afghanistan was the last proxy war in the contest. As the new film “Charlie Wilson’s War” points out, the support for “freedom fighters” in that conflict was ultimately bipartisan in nature. Bipartisan and, in the end, never truly interested in freedom for the Afghan people. With the help of Pakistani intelligence forces and funding from Sunni extremists in the Arab world, we helped the mujahadeen bleed the Soviets pale in their own little version of Vietnam.

In some stark terms we won —the mission was accomplished. The Soviet tanks pulled out and limped home in time for the collapse of “the evil empire.” And the power vacuum left behind in Afghanistan —it would be filled by a strange mutation of those mujahadeen freedom fighters, the Taliban.

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What if Iowa sent along all the candidates to NH with momentum? What if even the most partisan supporters of Clinton, Obama, and Edwards agreed to knowingly split their votes and keep the top 5 or 6 candidates in a near dead heat in the race?
Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and Bill Richardson have shown their […]

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One of the things Benazir Bhutto was arguing for, as she campaigned for the upcoming elections, was a rejection of that false choice between security and freedom. She wanted to see beyond the spectacle of political violence and terrorism. She wanted that for her own people, but just as importantly she wanted the world to see this. She had pledged to confront the violent extremists, not to abide by them and she planned to do this with something much more effective than helicopter gunships or police state repression. She campaigned on the idea that the most effective weapon in the face of terrorism was the clear mandate of legitimate democracy. There are those who argue that her murder is evidence of her mistaken outlook. To my mind, they only take the crime one step further.

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