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• On this Veterans Day there are reports of nine more American deaths in Afghanistan. This was the “good” war, to avenge 9/11 by routing the obstinate Taliban and destroying Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda. Really? The greatest military machine in the history of the world cannot catch a cave-dwelling guru and his merry band of assassins? Phooey! What is never discussed is Hamid Karzai’s former association with the oil industry and our long-held desire to construct and oil line from the former Soviet Union “…stans” to the sea. You see, if we had done in Al Qaeda and Bin Laden too soon, there would not have been an albeit phony justification for the Iraq invasion. That was to be just the start of a complete Neocon takeover of the Middle East—and North Korea. It is amazing that, even after incompetently having screwed that up, they still are planning to attack Iran!

• Anyone is nuts who thinks that Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf is going to give up his military command and take a powerless civilian post. Dictators do not cede their authority peacefully. Musharraf badly muffed the assassination attempt on Benazir Bhutto, so he was forced to use martial law in order to control matters, jail (is a jail is a jail) Bhutto, and ultimately void the elections and constitutional authority. Dubya: What a mess you’ve got us in!

• I caught the elusive George Soros on C-SPAN II. He is very passionate and intelligent. He got my attention when responding to a question as to how he came to the U.S. Apparently; he attended an Esperanto seminar in Switzerland and never returned to Communist Hungary. Unfortunately having to explain “Esperanto,” he added that its failure to become the world’s lingua franca left the field open to “bad English,” which now serves as the international language.

• They made a lot over Bill Clinton’s harmless and tortuous attempt to parse the term “is.” Currently being parsed is another, very harmful term of torture: “Water-boarding.” After a pusillanimous senate approved the new attorney general even though he could/would(?) not determine whether that term constitutes torture, we now know that torture is whatever the Dubya clan says it is.