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McCain says he will suspend his political campaign on Thursday morning and is calling for a cancellation of the debate. Joe Barton (R-Texas) just came on CNN and said there are not 50 votes in the House for the Paulson plan. In otherwords,the financial markets are flying on one engine for a while, with no […]

You know those ballyhooed meetings of Sarah Palin with world leaders? What if they weren’t even talking about foreign policy? Since the press was kept out, how would we know? But the press did get one glimpse: ‘The first meeting was with Afghan President Hamed Karzai, and the content was hardly diplomatic dynamite. According to […]

Michael Tomasky writes: ‘The lobbying firm of Rick Davis, the manager, was being paid $15,000 a month by Freddie Mac until last month. That fact is a direct contradiction of words McCain had spoken Sunday night. At that time, responding to a Times story being prepared for Monday’s paper revealing that Davis had been the […]

Riz Khan on US-Iranian relations, interviewing Gary Sick. Veteran diplomat Edward P. Djerejian also weighs in on US-Iranian relations: ‘You negotiate peace with your adversaries and enemies, not with your friends. That is what diplomacy is all about. With current sanctions and talks under the aegis of the United Nations making little progress in impeding […]

“I send my tormentor hurrying hither and thither in the service of my suffering and desire.” – Mason Cooley (d.2002) I have concluded that Americans, who pretend in public to be straitlaced, are in fact rabid masochists addicted to whips, black leather and the application of fists. It turns out that large numbers of people […]

Aljazeera English shows and analyzes a just-released security tape from the Marriott in Islamabad, showing the bomb-laden truck ramming the security perimeter. There were two initial explosions on the truck, probably to prime the big bomb and security personnel were trying to put out the fire on the truck . . .

Bloomberg argues that Saturday’s bombing of the Marriott in Islamabad will likely put pressure on US/ Pakistani relations. The bombing was a clear signal from militants that the Pakistani government must back away from its American alliance. Newly elected president Ali Asaf Zardari gave an address to the parliament in which he called for the […]

3,000 progressives in Cologne clashed Saturday with far rightwing protesters trying to stop the building of a mosque. There are about 3.3 million Muslims in Germany, about 4 percent of the population. The Jewish population of the US is 2%, so this would be as though American rightwingers tried to stop a synagogue from being […]

Guerrillas in Pakistan set off an enormous bomb blast at the Marriott in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad Saturday morning EDT. It left a 30 foot crater and set off a conflagration that was still burning brightly hours after the bombing. Aljazeera English reports on the explosion: The Pakistani military has been bombing the tribal […]