Demonstrators clean-up Egypt's streets

Egyptians clean up after the protests and the parties...

Obama about Mubarak stepping down

Or being tossed out on his head:

Tag, you're it!

From Thom Hartmann's "Rebooting the American Dream,"

The Biggest Lesson of History

As challenging as the task may seem, we’re facing nothing compared with what the Founders took on; and Franklin Roosevelt famously told us that while great wealth may hate him, “I welcome their hatred.” Presidents can lead on behalf of the people, but only when the people demand that they do so.

That’s the biggest lesson of history. It took the excesses of the Tea Act of 1773—cutting to virtually nothing the taxes the East India Company paid on tea so that it could destroy its small colonial competitors—to provoke the colonists to commit the act of anti-corporate vandalism known as the Boston Tea Party.

It took the excesses of the robber barons to provoke Teddy Roosevelt to challenge them. It took the nationwide economic destruction of the Republican Great Depression to motivate the people enough to support and encourage Franklin D. Roosevelt to institute—over three (and a fraction) presidential terms—the New Deal.

Our economy is in tatters, the result of more than 30 years of Reaganomics and Clintonomics. Our democracy is hanging by a thread, the result of 40 years of radical Supreme Court decisions steadily advancing the powers of corporations and suppressing the rights of individuals and their government. And our environment is trembling under the combined assault of the Industrial Revolution and nearly 7 billion bundles of human flesh.

It’s the perfect time. We are clearly at a nexus, a threshold, a tipping point. If the past is any indicator, things will get worse before they get better, but in that tragedy will be both the catalyst and the seeds for a very positive future.

Now is the most important time for us all to be paying attention, to show up, and to wake up our friends, family, and neighbors. Because this nation is on the edge of a radical restart, a reboot.

Tag, you’re it.

There's rioting in Africa....

Egypt. And here.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose....

Eliminate! Eliminate!

I didn't John Bolton of the Walrus Mustache of Hate was a Dalek...



But he sure sounds like one...




The Los Angeles Times prints Bolton's cry for Regime Change! Not diplomacy! Regime Change!

To date at least, the Obama administration's answer remains a resounding no. Obama wants negotiations with Tehran, not regime change. Given that the Revolutionary Guard and the hard-line mullahs -- and not the people -- are increasingly likely to be the short-term winners of the current Battle for Iran, supporters of regime change must now make longer-term plans.

We have missed a huge opportunity because of Obama's error (and that of his predecessors), but the continuing threat of Iranian nuclear weapons and support for international terrorism make the imperative of regime change no less compelling. The Iranian people will continue their opposition no matter how inconvenient it is for Obama's hoped-for negotiations. We should support them, and not just by rhetoric.

um... Mr. Bolton? With what? Support them with what? You and your Neocon buddies in the Bush administration broke the military. You now want to bomb and invade Iran too? Haven't you Neocons done enough damage, caused enough wreckage, destroyed enough lives and property to content you? Is that all you guys can think of? The world will worship in shock and awe the US because we're the biggest baddest bullies nuked up and willing to use them?

Well, invading Afghanistan AND Iraq kinda blew a hole in your plans for world domination, didn't it? Things looked really good on paper: kick Saddam out, pop Chalabi in, and then you're wedged in tight right in the middle of the biggest oil fields of them all. Then you could threaten and harass Iran and maybe even bomb them into submission, right?

But Afghanistan did what it always does when invaded, changed hats to the invaders colors and waited to see what promises were kept. Which turned out to be very little, because you guys were in such a hurry to invade Iraq. Strangely, Iraq didn't like being invaded and getting rid of Saddam started a veritable bloodbath of epic proportions.

The wreckage you have caused in these two countries will never be fixed. You have stained the ground with blood, depleted uranium, destroyed infrastructure, lies, and broken promises. No one will trust the US ever again. And we owe this all to you.

Just why are you being given print space anyway?

The PNAC's vision of the future

Eternal Wars.

Juan Cole:

Iraq is an Oil War in the mind of politicians like Dick Cheney. It was necessary to deny it to China and other rivals thirty to fifty years in the future. It was necessary to open its vast petroleum fields up for exploration and cast aside anti-American Baath socialism.

Likewise, the religious rigidity of the Pushtun peoples of Helmand province is not the real reason for the US insistence on occupying Afghanistan. It is the vast Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan gas fields that Cheney has his eye on. It was the US hope to use a pipeline from Turkmenistan to supply Pakistan and India, and so forestall a deal by those two countries with Iran. The inability of the Bush administration to calm things down in Afghanistan sufficiently for anyone to dream of putting in such a pipeline and having it avoid routine sabotage has made it likely that Iran will break out of the Bush boycott toward the East.

Hunger for future rights to petroleum and positioning the US to remain a superpower in a world of hydrocarbon scarcity is also driving the campaign to get up a war against Iran. Why can Pakistan have a nuclear weapon, and that is all right, but Iran cannot? Pakistan has very little petroleum. Iran has a lot, and maybe 750 trillion cubic feet of gas in the southwest. If it gets a bomb, regime change becomes impossible, and if Iran wants to tie its supplies up in proprietary contracts with China and India, locking out the United States, it will be able to do so.

Continued heavy dependence on gas and oil therefore not only turns the world into a hothouse, with rising seas, ever more destructive hurricanes, and possibly disastrous shifts in the ocean currents, but it also drives the United States to more and more wars.