Salon

Having devoted his career to shocking and outraging American liberals, the late North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms continues to provoke them from his grave. Progressive journals and blogs are full of Helms horror stories. How he tried to make Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun cry by singing "Dixie" in the Senate elevator. How he won reelection against a black opponent by means of an ad showing the hands of a white man who had allegedly lost a job because of… more

Pakistanis favor negotiating with Taliban militants rather than fighting them and hold their U.S. allies in the war on terror most responsible for violence in the country, according to a poll released Friday... The poll by the Washington-based group Terror Free Tomorrow also shows that three-quarters of respondents want U.S.-backed President Pervez Musharraf to resign or be impeached and that the popularity of his chief critic, Nawaz Sharif, is soaring... Terror Free Tomorrow, a not-for-profit group, investigates why… more

Can the U.S. redeem itself overseas? (Salon.com)

Author Parag Khanna considers global superpowers and whether the United States can regain its standing in the world, here on Big Think, presented by Video Dog on Salon.com.

Last week, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto marked the failure of an ill-conceived U.S. attempt to orchestrate the return of a deeply divisive political exile, discredited by allegations of corruption and incompetence, to take power in Pakistan. The Bush administration's aim was to install a leader who would simultaneously "democratize" and secularize her country, fight terrorist groups, and make peace with Israel. Instead, the sad event of Bhutto's murder has exposed the strategic bankruptcy of the administration's Pakistan policy. But… more

The latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program raises questions once again about the Bush administration's veracity in describing a nuclear threat. But President Bush's worst misrepresentations about the Iranian nuclear issue do not focus on whether Tehran is currently pursuing a nuclear weapons program or when Bush knew the U.S. intelligence community was revising its previous assessments. Rather, the real lie is the president's claim that his administration has made a serious offer to negotiate with the Islamic… more

It was the brightest burst of news from the Middle East in a long time: Iran, it turned out, was nowhere near getting the bomb. But for the White House it was a political bombshell, tossed directly into the Bush-Cheney bunker.

The revelation this week of the latest National Intelligence Estimate, concluding that Iran halted its covert nuclear weapons program in 2003, upended a long-running rhetorical campaign by the president and vice president. Just six weeks prior, in a signature… more

...Steve Clemons' recent, much-discussed article in Salon emphasized the role military commanders have played in insisting that a military strike against Iran would be disastrous. And Clemons cited this post from Time's Joe Klein which reported that the Joint Chiefs, when asked last December by Bush about air strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, were "unanimously opposed to taking that course of action," and they warned that "the Iranian response in Iraq and, quite possibly, in terrorist attacks on the U.S.… more

During a recent high-powered Washington dinner party attended by 18 people, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft squared off across the table over whether President Bush will bomb Iran.

Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Carter, said he believed Bush's team had laid a track leading to a single course of action: a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. Scowcroft, who was NSA to Presidents Ford and the first Bush, held out hope that the current President Bush… more

Carl Levin, probably the most influential Senate Democrat on Iraq policy, just returned from a "visit to Iraq." In a joint statement with GOP Sen. John Warner, he pronounced that "the military aspects of President Bush's new strategy in Iraq, as articulated by him on January 10, 2007, appear to have produced some credible and positive results."

While expressing various "concerns," they particularly hailed "the continuing improvement in the ability and willingness of the Iraqi Army to conduct combat… more

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings sounded like a reformer when she testified on Capitol Hill earlier this month over recent revelations of waste, fraud and bribery in the $85 billion-a-year student loan industry."Federal student aid is crying out for reform," said Spellings, speaking before the House Committee on Education and Labor. "The system is redundant, it's Byzantine, and it's broken..."Between 2001 and 2006 a handful of companies that issue federally guaranteed student loans had what one… more