People, people, people...have we learned nothing from Paris Hilton throughout this past year. She befriends you, makes you feel important, poses along side you for pictures, but once you take it too far and flash your crotch, she'll dump you like a hot potato. Celebrity and foriegn policy have a lot in common, wouldn't you say?

...why not privatize the whole commons for the fun and profit of every corporation with the money to spend on their own private governments and armed forces?

I'll tell you why not.

Because then we're right back where we started from prior to the French Enlightenment, circa 1750 or so. Think of your friendly neighborhood corporation as a castle and its board of directors as your feudal lords. Welcome to serfdom in the 21st century.

Progressives may waste alot of time trying to mollycoddle those who always seem to suffer, but conservatives kill innocent people and then leave progressives to clean up their filthy messes. Progressives try to take responsibility, conservatives obfuscate and then blame others. You can't drive forward into the future using your rear view mirror, unless you're always in reverse. But common sense has never stopped a conservative from being idiotic before, so why should it now?

It wasn't the corporations that gave us all of this wealth, it was the ingenuity of the American worker, period. And we did it in spite of corporate control and influence, not because of it.

Fascism doesn't work. The reason there was a third reich was because the first two failed. And the fourth reich will, after much human suffering and bloodshed, fall just as the three before it. The efficiencies of fascist dictatorships are quickly lost to a leadership class enamored by all the power they are given. The power rots them into common hoodlums who are then undone by their own depraved indifference to those who make their jobs possible.

Corporations have, for the past 150 years, operated under the assumption that human beings are little more than cattle, a fixed asset that declines in value as it ages. Human beings are capable of far more than corporations can tolerate or can possibly contain and so they must oppress the working class in order to retain their hegemony. Thank you, George Orwell.

Vast concentrations of wealth only benefit a leadership class that quickly grows too accustomed to using leverage to accomplish what should be done with one's bare hands. Hence we have inflation because the leadership class devised the Federal Reserve system to subvert the US Constitution and keep all of our pockets picked clean whenever they choose to do so.

Hence we have Prescott Bush saying of our 41st President (when he was a young man), "I don't know what I'm going to do with that stupid son of a b*tch." The projection of ineptitude of father to son only became worse in each successive generation. Two generations later we have a complete idiot running a 3 trillion dollar economy into the dirt simply because no one can make any money unless the demolition is controlled. And conservatives think progressives are cynical? Get a load of the Bush Family's conniving contrivances!

Hypocrite? I suck air in the 21st century; therefore, I compromise. And so do you, Stubby Johnson. If going from a 1 to 1 calorie exchange between petroleum and edible food to a 2000 to 1 ratio in less than 50 years is not about fatuous indignity, then what is? All brought to you courtesy of those free-thinking brainiacs populating the board rooms of some of our finer oil corporations.

The same ones who hung Ken Saro Wi Wo because they couldn't make their numbers unless the Ogoni people got used to eating their rice with a dollup of sweet crude. The same ones who insisted on importing Nazi expertise into the American Defense establishment lest they lose all of that valuable information gleened from years of scientifically torturing men, women and children.

The level of naivete required to believe that corporations are our friends, always willing and able to lend a neighborly hand with the groceries or the garage can not be found outside of the rabbit hole these idiots through our entire species down with their tales of the Easter Bunny and of dead men rising from the grave to save us from all those evil, nasty poor people.

As far as I could tell, it was never carried in the US press, but the BBC reported that Saddam was captured in the rat-hole after being turned in by a tribe that knew where he was. He was alone in the rat-hole, spoke English when pulled out, and the hole was covered with a large heavy object.

I heard a rumor from a military guy that someone had called into America's Most Wanted hotline and turned Saddam in. It looks like the protestors at the execution were staged, just like the take-down of the Saddam statue.

So stop us, you dumb fuck!

Oh yeah, you're too "loving" and "peaceful" to keep up a military which would allow you to keep tabs on Washington's power, you'd rather your precious welfare states than waste money on a military. You figured, "let the Americans do it if they are stupid enough to pay for it".

Now your chickens of the last 50 years are coming home to roost, ain't they? Can't stop the superpower you've created without destroying yourselves, huh?

Enjoy the ride, mofos, cause the Mahdi and JC say the apocalypse is coming and we are Khali!

YEE HAW!

Public excution (or visible proof thereof) is necessary in Iraq in order to prove beyond any possible doubt that the dictator no long exists. Otherwise, groups rise up claiming he does exist and is leading a new and glorious return to power. Such is history in Iraq.

It is not up to us or any foreigner to decree otherwise. We Americans are so cozy in our own perceived moral and intellectual omnipotence that we relate every culture to our own. It doesn't work that way. Never has, never will. We seem to have become a mob of know-it-all vocal opinions with no true first-hand knowledge or understanding of the culture we opine about.

I wonder how many of us actually have Iraqi (not Iraqi-American) friends who do not have to temper what they say to be politically correct for the US press. (I wonder, in fact, whether the author has ever lived there for any period or has Arab friends in Iraq-not here) They are wonderful people with no illusions about what it means to see a power change in Iraq.

Some countries are subject to tsunamis, others to social upheaval. Nothing but separation and 'flood walls' will ever change that. Including us.

It's a sad business all around. But it is still Iraq whether we're there or not.