As long as we allow ourselves to be caught up in the phony Dem vs. Rep duopoly kabuki games, and refuse to see them as the two arms of the same body, it will be easy to keep us fooled, distracted, and the truth concealed. Only when we're grown up enough to recognize that we live in a hegemonic regime, which seeks and maintains Empire as a profit base for its chosen business cartels will we begin to grasp where we are in the world.

Fogh Rasmussen is an embarrassment to Denmark, Danes, and Danish-descended people everywhere. It's as though 60 years later we got our own Vidkun Quisling.

It's not a simple binary. One can neither say Israel is a piece of US policy, nor that US middle east policy is dictated by Israel. The interests, policies and practices of the two nations are much more closely interwoven, much less objectified than that. It is an histrical abnormality for two sovereign nations to be so closely bound together, so inseverable, but unusual hardly means impossible. As long as the ruling elites in both nations genuinely believe they are gaining indispensable advantage through this relationship, it wil persist, and as of yet there is no sign that either nation's rulers have any significant dissatisfaction.

A lot longer than ten years. The last time Congress declared war was 1941, WWII. The US has been almost perpetually at war since WWII, and not one time has Congress declared it. The US constitution today carries roughly the same weight that the Soviet Constitution carried in 1953.

As soon as I heard about the Israeli bombing of Syria, a thought came to mind for me. A question, for which I really don't know the answer. It is this: Has al-Qaeda ever attacked Israel?

The special quality of Drone Wars is that they make permanent state of war quite feasible, and put a permanent end to any mass based peace movements, by eliminating the casualties of the drone-armed side. In fact, they guaranty that when retaliation finally des come, it must be against civilian targets. This terrorism will then be met with mass public demands for increasing the drone war dramatically, an action dear to the hearts of the Raytheons of the world.

The oldest problem in budget-cutting: it's almost always the case that those available to manage a budget-cutting program are themselves the redundant and unnecessary cost centers, and people are very very unlikely to eliminate their own positions.

Afghan "Local Police". They aren't necessarily local, and they aren't police at all in any sense that we would recognize. They are warlordist fighting detachments that have been trained, organized and equipped at US expense, but remain loyalists of their particular warlord. A large-scale defection of a couple dozen Afghan "Local Police" to a growing and strengthening Taliban, such as exists in northwestern Afghanistan, wouldn't surprise me in the least.

Hardly. Western governments have no interest in seeing "modern democracy" anywhere, including their own oligarchic states, never mind their Islamist resource-extraction state clients. They're interested in who will do business with them on the most concessionary terms, whose rule will bring the biggest bucks into the Empire of Globalized Capital. And they measure these things the modern "market-driven" way, by the next quarter's bottom line, not by anything remote;ly resembling long-term prudence, never mind democracy.