Like the Pep Boys and brownbanded cockroaches, Larry Franklin evidently is in it for the long haul - even if it means blogging from the pokey.

You remember Franklin. He's the only defendant imprisoned in the abandoned "AIPAC spy scandal". A Defense Department functionary and part of Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans staff, he took the hit for passing on secret information about Iran to Israel via the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, while co-defendants (and AIPAC honchos) Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman walked.

This week, in a Foreign Policy post, My Secret Plan to Overthrow the Mullahs, Franklin offers part apologia and part rabble-rousing from his lonely prison cell.

Read more »

I voted for Barack Obama after long months of supporting his candidacy - sending him money online and prattling about him in every kitchen I could invade, to every friend or acquaintance I could buttonhole.

I became impressed with him in February 2007, when I watched him announce his campaign on a cold Saturday to a small crowd at the old statehouse in Springfield, Il - where Lincoln once worked, pundits never tired of telling us.

I liked what he said. It was 180-degrees from the reality we were living, four years downwind of the Iraq invasion, 19 months from the meltdown plunge, six years into the meanest, most infantile administration of physical and moral cowards with which, thankfully, we've ever been burdened in this country's history. If ever we wondered how the country would fare should ultimate authority fall into the hands of obnoxious, coddled frat boys, we discovered, too late, that fate would be a disaster generations mending.

For simply not being Geoge W. Bush, Barack Obama will always have my affection and gratitude, both as voter and American.

Read more »

There was a lot for non-Jews to cheer about when J Street started taking heat from the big guns of what some American miscreants dare call "the Israel Lobby".

It means that non-existent lobby is taking the upstart opposition group seriously.

Read more »

Up is down, night is day, and there is a limit to human venali-tay.

Lately, as I revel in the tepid, dreary pleasure of my drive to and from work in the urban garden that is downtown L.A. - anonymously monolithic and reeking of poverty's urine - I've become annoyed at all the far-Right talk radio cluttering up the airwaves. So much so, that I've started punching the 'scan' button to find something less recklessly heartless.

Edging in amid static, and fading easily, are a few "Radio Free Los Angeles" stations hammering a political line from the far, far other end of the spectrum. Between badly recorded garage punk triumphalism, disembodied voices shout denunciation of all fearsome evils wracking our nation and time - racism, class warfare, counter-revolutionary activity, dogfighting, dog eating, the persecution of Mumia, Palestine, etc. If you're over the age of, maybe, 25, it's all stuff you've heard before. A lot. But a new scare issue has popped up in time for Hallowe'en:

The H1N1 vaccine.

Read more »

At the southeastern corner of Arizona, there is across the international border a small town called Naco, Sonora. As late as the first half of the 1970s, when I attended the university in Tucson, nasty scarring still marked adobe bricks in the south wall of an old hotel there. Some were likely bullet holes, some were divots the size of softballs, indications of shrapnel from pretty good-sized howitzer shells.

Read more »

The foxes guarding our much-raided chickens have handed us a gamy egg in exchange for stealing the coop.

I guess I should be real impressed the Obama administration has drawn a line in the sand and told seven banks they couldn't pay their executives kings' ransoms out of the bailout kitty. It's an emotional issue, after all. Why should already-rich, overpaid crooks who got us in the meltdown jam profit with taxpayer money? As current affair, it's like episodic TV and freeway driving: There are good guys, bad guys, dumb folk and bang-up excitement. Maybe even a little blood and some broken glass.

Meanwhile, though, efforts to plug up the crumbling dike that is the derivatives market with safe-and-sane regulations are fading away slowly under cover of the bankers' salary smokescreen.

Read more »

Interesting fallout from the newest spy case to affect if not actually involve our close, close, close Mideast ally: BradBlog notes this thoroughly unsurprising development seems to validate allegations made by a perennial neocon punching bag and FBI whistleblower:

This is, of course, the precise sort of thing which FBI linguist-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds has been alleging concerning both Turkish and Israeli interests for some time. In her case, she has testified under oath to nearly-identical behavior by U.S. scientists, military personnel and academics at top-secret nuclear and military installations who are alleged to have done precisely what Stewart David Nozette has now been busted for...

Read more »

One of the strangest schemes in our long, tired, sports-bar loudmouth of a foreign policy is the European Missile Shield, purportedly intended to protect the soft underbelly of the Mighty Continent against an Iranian missile attack.

Say... what?

And we can expect, perhaps, the next exceedingly bright idea down the 'pike an anti-gang task force for Martha's Vineyard?

Iran?

Read more »

The wolf was at the door again last night...

I could tell from the trail of unpaid TARP receipts left behind on the front walk this morning.

For all the hardball squeezing banks put their customers through, compounding costly penalities and late fees on every tardy payment, they sure don't bust their asses reimbursing federal bailout money they've gotten over the past year.

Read more »

OK. Put away the PS3 controller and turn off the porn.

Test time.

Read more »

If my daughter ever asks me what I did in the war, I'll wonder, "Which one?" Then, before she answers, I'll fill in for her my unambiguous history: "Nothing".

Read more »

"Always keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out."

- Albert Einstein

After years in the hocus-pocus fantasy land of the Bay Area, where the margin separating straitjacket dementia from New-Age revelation is virtually nonexistent, I discovered in the mid-'90s Michael Shermer's Skeptic magazine. And it saved, if not my life, then certainly my sanity. 

Read more »

...The Right and the Left pick and choose their wars. Vietnam was a righteous crusade to the Right, a shame-inducing albatross for the Left. For the "progressive" Left, Clinton's Balkan adventure was a heroic reenactment of World War II, albeit on a less dramatic and destructive scale; for the Right, it was a case of international do-gooding that enabled our Islamist enemies to rally their forces.

- Justin Raimondo, 10/07/09

Sure looks like the "hawks' nest" pushing for shock and awe revival - joined, of course, by our spongy media - have done their work well. A poll released today shows not only that Americans favor military action against Iran, should talks fail, but also indicates most of the country gives chances for success in seminal U.S./Iran negotiations at roughly the same odds as Kermit the Frog winning the Tour de France.

The survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found... 61 percent (of Americans) say it's critical to stop Iran, even if it takes military action, while 24 percent say it's more important to avoid military action even if it means Iran becomes a nuclear power... But Americans are skeptical about the prospects - 64 percent say the talks will not succeed at getting Iran to stop its suspected work on a nuclear weapon while just 22 percent believe the talks will eventually pay off. [Source: McClatchey Newspapers]

Read more »

Sometimes my boiling point is real low. Like... same temperature to optimally chill American beer. Not Antarctic low, but not body heat, either. Low... ok? In those moments, it doesn't take much to get my Pampers all in a bunch.

So now I'm hot, since my dreary drive-time up the 101 has been ruined - ruined - by some jackass named Roger Hedgecock, yapping away the afternoon on what had been my favorite all-news radio station.

Read more »

One of those oddball synchronicities came together this early autumn, as the arrest of director Roman Polanski for his long-evaded pedophilia penalty coincided by days with the death of a Manson-family killer, who's list of victims in a legendary murder spree 40 years ago included Polanski's then-wife, Sharon Tate.

Read more »