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US troops targeting a Sunni Arab guerrilla appear instead to have killed an Iraqi family of 8 in a town 70 mi. north of Baghdad on Friday. Three women were among the dead. AFP reports of Tikrit, ‘Large crowds protested against the US raid after the main weekly Muslim prayers in the city, capital of […]

H t Josh Marshall: John McCain: “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

60 Minutes Interviewed Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad a couple of years ago. They cut some key passages out of the interview. I’ve made the same point at Informed Comment in the past. It is legitimate to decry his positions, and I decry a lot of them. It is not legitimate to misrepresent what he has […]

Newsweek asks if the fundamentalist vigilantes (my term) who hit the US embassy in Sanaa, Yemen included returnees from the fighting in Iraq. If the answer is yes, then it is a refutation of the right-wing US ‘flypaper theory’ and instead a vindication of those who feared a long US military occupation of Iraq would […]

John McCain seems to have gotten confused in an interview about Spanish prime minister Zapatero and someone in Latin America. When pressed he kept talking about Latin America and “this hemisphere.” Did he get mixed up with the Mexican peasant protest movement, the Zapatistas? Did he just assume the question was about one of those […]

Reuters on Tzipi Livni’s likely stance on negotiating with the Palestinians. Palestinian reactions to Tzipi Livni becoming head of the Kadima Party, a rightwing party that splintered from the even more rightwing Likud Party over the withdrawal from Gaza. (i.e. a Kadima supporter is a Likudnik who has been mugged by demographic reality); via Aljazeera […]

The European Union is moving closer to a goal of 20% of European energy coming from renewable energy sources instead of fossil fuels by 2020. Unfortunately, they left in biofuels, which in my view are a distraction. The question isn’t whether it is renewable, the question is whether the energy puts more carbon into the […]

They actually put it in baby bottles! Chemical in plastics gives you diabetes, heart attacks. We are now exposed to thousands of chemicals in daily life. My guess is, this is only the tip of the iceberg. The chemical companies will do some more ads. It is sort of like the coal industry trying to […]

Aljazeera reports on the dim view Palestinians are taking of the contest for leadership of the Kadima Party in Israel.