I've been following the expansioin of the war in Afghanistan into Pakistani territory. To recap briefly, Pakistan held elections, and the newly elected national and regional government in the frontier provinces won on a pledge to talk to and make peace with the tribesmen in Pakistan's frontier provinces bordering Afghanistan.  Pakistan has no further intention of killing its own citizens to pleae the US, and, predictably, the US is reacting violently.

Last week a major incursion and air strikes took place into the Pakistan border region, with 11 Pakistani Frontier Corps soliders killed in US airstrikes. The US is still denying this, but at the same time, US puppet Karzai just issued threats to cross the border with the Afghan Army and target Batullah Mehsud, the top Pakistani Taliban leader, and the US launched another strike into Pakistani terrotory, targetting Batullah, while the British have confirmed a large expandion of their Special Forces operations in Pakistani terrority. The sound you are hearing is the US being sucked into a major escalation of conflict with a nuclear Muslim power.

Read on for the Apocalypse Now update.    

Just when I thought that the Junior Senator from New York couldn't possibly be more shameless, I run across this WSJ wire:

Sen. Hillary Clinton plans to introduce legislation today in the U.S. Senate following up on her campaign commitment to put the federal gas tax on hiatus during the peak summer driving season, said campaign spokesman Doug Hattaway.

More below.

So Arizona bill SB 1108 says it would ban state-funded colleges and universities from offering classes that are "deemed contradictory to the values of American democracy or Western civilization."

I spent a few years teaching introductory courses in a university philosophy department, trying to turn young minds on to philosophy as a way of thinking and a way of life.  Let's think for a minute about how many of those texts are "contradictory to the values of American democracy or Western civilization", shall we?

It is OK to be upset, but be upset for all the right reasons.

Read on...

(H/T to ZappoDave for sharing his patent idea)

Sure, I could have watched the debates.  But why bother?  Another pointless exercise in media spin... I want my entertainment on the seamy side.  You know...full bore batsh!t insane.  Not Carville's "Ragin Cajun ®" histrionics.  That's like drinking Sparkling Cider and hoping for a Tequila high.

When I want my nutjob fix, there is only one place to go.... the girl who never disappoints.   The lady who has taken pretzel logic to a whole new dimension.   Remember the flexible Asian contortionists they used to have at Cirque de Soleil?  A few minutes inside Coulter's head and those girls would be screaming.  It's that twisted.

This week I think she slipped a disk tying herself into a knot.  In the midst of insulting Pakistanis as stinking savages, and the usual folderol conflating liberals with al Qaeda, she slipped this jab in at Musharraf ... "Tolstoy of the Zulus"... Her geographic faux pas caught me off guard because I thought she was defending him.   Anyway, it got me thinking.  And it's not often "thinking" and "Coulter" wind up in the same paragraph... so I dove in head first.

The first few headlines that I saw this morning (after reading Jerome’s diary on the Bush fatwa against the Democratic Congress), coupled with the lead story I heard this morning as I was getting ready to head to the airport, made me scratch my head and wonder just what the hell else is going to come out and will it even surprise me in the least.

Where to even begin?  I guess we can start with a followup to the comments cited in my diary yesterday about the Saddam hanging backlash.  As part of the Iraqi government’s investigation into the circumstances surrounding the video of Saddam’s hanging, we find that the protests against his hanging are now intensifying.

It seems that nothing can stop the high-speed replay of Vietnam that we call the Iraq war. We are now getting the "surge" escalation that parallels the Westmoreland escalation up to 500,000 troops in Vietnam. Next, we can expect the final desperate Nixonian aggression to salvage "victory" from a doomed neo-colonial war. This will take the form of the spilling over of the war into an adjacent country.

The NeoCons have already said that Bush's difficulties result from not fighting the war on a "broad enough canvas," and they are urging Bush to attack Syria and Iraq. This means the equivalent of the bombing, and resulting destruction, of Cambodia is about to take place. The only question is if the parallel to Cambodia will be Syria or Iran (or both).

We are all watching, helplessly, as an insane President and his insane advisors deliberately replay Vietnam to prove that the United States cannot lose a neo-colonial war. They are willing to kill millions of people to demonstrate that the United States is an invincible imperial power. As we enter 2007, the year is really 1969. We have learned nothing, and our war machine rolls on, bringing ruin to all.

You can call it DPM for short. Democratic Party Militarism is the ironic "reward" progressives get for taking control of both houses of Congress. It will be the DEMOCRATS who will shatter all records for inflating our military establishment. Never to be outdone by Bush in worshipping and grovelling before America's glorious, sacred military, The DEMOCRATIC PARTY will add tens of thousands of soldiers to a military that neither wants to occupy other nations, nor has the capacity to do so.

Why will this happen? Because the worse the consequences of American militarism become, the more tightly America clings to the illusion that the military is the basis of our power. The Democrats and Republicans agree: the remedy for the failures of militarism is MORE MILITARISM. The remedy for unchecked military spending is MORE SPENDING. The answer to an endless war is MORE CAPACITY TO WAGE ENDLESS WAR.

Everything is different now. Now the Democrats will expand the largest military establishment in the World, not the Republicans.

Just as WWII was the inevitable consequence of the folly of WWI. The Iraq war has been the consequence of America's failure to accept defeat in Vietnam. Let's look at the linkages.

Although Orwell was fundamentally correct in predicting the end state of totalitarian regimes, he overlooked the distinctively American contribution to this process. In America, we enslaved ourselves not through the naked brutality of a dominant cadre of authoritarians, but through the subtle wizardry of their media technicians, particularly the TV propaganda producers.

A 19th century author, mathematician and logician, Carroll is best remembered for his wonderful novels Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.  His last major work was The Hunting of the Snark.  Carroll's particular brand of "snarkiness" consisted of portraying absurd characters whose behavior and speech were patently illogical and contradictory.  

Here are a few of my favorite absurdities ground out by the Bush Mill over the past week.

There is nothing easier than lopping off heads and nothing harder than developing ideas.  ~  Dostoevsky

As I write this I am so depressed that I can barely work up a rant on the Republican right - something I can normally do in my sleep.  I am horrified that an already terrible situation has gotten so much worse.  What was the Bush Administration's shameful debacle in Iraq has become a multi-national conflagration, and threatens to blossom into World War III.

How did it ever come to this?

Consider Guantanamo. The parading and humiliation of the orange-clad inmates is a symbolic display of triumph over an enemy. Bush's clumsy invasion of Iraq was largely staged for photo ops of an army dashing to victory. Even crazy boondoggles like missile defense can be viewed as conspicuous DISPLAYS of bellicose intent.

"Paul Levy, in The Madness of George W. Bush, does a brilliant job of deconstructing the invisible spiritual and cultural ways that corruption flows into our souls and our minds -- rooting itself in our day to day lives in a manner that can cause an entire culture to go mad together. This book is an invaluable contribution to creating the change of hearts and minds that is the pathway to true evolution." ~ Catherine Austin Fitts, Former Assistant Secretary of Housing (Bush 1)

The press was silent.

The congress was silent.

The churches were silent.

The schools and universities were silent.

Are we now so hungry for death and violence that we will quietly prepare to attack another country with the most horrible weapon ever invented? The answer is silence.

This is the silence of the damned. If this horrible thing comes to pass, all Americans who silently assented to it will bear a portion of the guilt to the end of their days.