According to Tom Coghlan, we’re all being played for suckers by those wily Afghans.  NATO contracts out supply to several “European headquartered” but otherwise unnamed companies; security for the convoys that deliver the supplies is the responsibility of the companies that prefer not to be named.  These companies take the path of least resistance…and quite possibly the only realistic path: they buy protection. Full story »

Ask Baby Boomers where they were when they heard President Kennedy had been assassinated. Ask Gen-Xers where they were when they heard about the Challenger explosion. Ask Americans where they were when they heard about 9/11.

Every generation has one: an event so monumental that it, in part, defines that generation—an event so big everyone stops to watch and listen and sometimes cry. Pearl Harbor…Hiroshima…the moon landing….

Joe Garner’s modern classic We Interrupt This Broadcast captures these moments and more—and now, reissued in a Tenth Anniversary Edition, there’s literally an entire CD more. Full story »

My December 10 article “Our Man in Bananastan” discussed how the hasty conclusion that Pakistani militants were behind the terror attack in India sounded like the bogus intelligence described in satiric espionage novels by Graham Greene and John le Carre. The New York Times, following the journalistic standard it established when it helped Dick Cheney sell the Iraq invasion, reported the “facts” of the Mumbai affair as deduced from double secret hearsay.

Recyclable Sources

The Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba was behind the Indian attack, according to an unnamed State Department official who was paraphrasing what unnamed American and Pakistani authorities had told him, but, unnamed American Embassy officials wouldn’t verify the story for the unnamed State official, nor would unnamed Pakistani officials in Islamabad.
Full story »

Well, here’s a fine howdy-do: Rick Warren, pastor of the mother of all mega-churches, has been tapped to channel Jesus conduct a seance deliver the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration. Because Warren is, you know, a “moderate.”

…in 2004 Warren declared that marriage, reproductive choice, and stem cell research were “non-negotiable” issues for Christian voters and has admitted that the main difference between himself and James Dobson is a matter of tone.  He criticized Obama’s answers at the Faith Forum he hosted before the election and vowed to continue to pressure him to change his views on the issue of reproductive choice.  He came out strongly in support of Prop 8, saying “there is no need to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2 percent of our population … Full story »