Clarion Content

Welcome loyal readers!! We are returning with the March version of the latest interesting links, from fascinating and delightful to horrifying to thought provoking, this is what we have seen and you have submitted. To check out our old interesting links posts click here. January's interesting links has links embedded to all the old links.

First a couple of fellow bloggers, one of whom the Clarion has been meaning to highlight for months. We know neither of them personally, but this first one, we admire her blog, Liberation Begins with Education, tremendously. She is clearly a committed political activist. Her blog is filled with wonderful links to further resources. She writes cogent, thoughtful essays and points the direction to others good work. We pop by here at least once a week. Here's an essay that we liked(though we didn't entirely agree with) about her objections to Hillary Clinton's possible presidency.

The second blogger we want to note, we have read less of, but what we have seen cracks us up. It is Some Guy's Blog, from Sammy Davis Jr. glass eye to Sandy Duncan's rumored glass eye, to shopping with grandma and the difference between Spock and sporks, nothing is safe from the razor sharp wit of Some Guy's Blog. Yep, he is just some guy, but he is some guy with a dang funny sense of humor. And, sheesh, does this guy, know how to find the funny pictures or what? He is highly hilarious.

Here's one more funny one that has been making the rounds of late. The name, Stuff White People Like, is a dead giveway that it isn't PC, but it is funny.

Having detoured a long way from the straight and narrow view with that last one, we will begin the transition back with a fun political cartoonist, from Newsday. Sometimes humor is the only way to face down the toughest of subjects, and a picture is worth 1,000 words or so they say...

To that end on a more political and far less bemusing note, sometimes the visual is the best way to communicate scale. This link provides a grim window into that insight. It looks at casualties from George Bush the II's Iraq War. It is important to note, as one of our local commentators pointed out to the Clarion, most Iraqi casualties from Bush II's war were not in fact wounded or killed by the American military. In fact, the vast majority of Iraqi dead and wounded are from the chaos the enveloped the country after America attacked. The descent into mob rule and the on-going civil war have claimed the most victims.

More thought provoking, Iraq related stuff we have seen in recent weeks includes, a new book by a crucial advisor in the run up to the Iraq War II, Douglas Feith. Feith was a chief architect of the Neo-Con approach to the Middle East. His early thinking on the fall of the Berlin Wall foreshadowed a day when the American military empire would refocus on the Middle East. Rather than give Feith credit for astute prediction, the Clarion sees him as an essential cog in the military industrial complex. His stance, along with that of the disgraced Paul Wolfowitz, helped move Rumsfeld and Cheney along the path to war. He helped convince them that a Middle Eastern resource war was an inevitable trajectory. While this book has yet to be released it already has the wonks and insiders buzzing. It is a massive tome that shunts blame for the war on to Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, rather than addressing head on the lies that Feith and others were spreading about ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Follow this link to read about a report the Pentagon published and immediately surpressed this week, concluding there were no connections between the Iraqi state and Al-Qaeda. Feith refuses to admit that the invasion was a disastrous mistake and in his book attempts to blame its horrific failure on the "disloyalty" of the State Department and other administration officials. The scariest part is that people like Doug Feith and Richard Perle are not in leg irons in front of the Capitol Building. Rather having never served a day of combat, they are still justifying and worse profiting (via consulting and lobbying) from having put other people's children in harms way.

Rather than end this post on that kind of discouraging, negative note, the Clarion has two more quickies for you. As the Crystal Method reminds us, "There is Hope." Hopeful note number one, a judge in Los Angeles freed a man who had spent 25 years in prison for a murder he always swore he didn't commit. An unreliable, sole eyewitness had put him away, thank goodness he didn't get the irreversible death penalty.

A final link for you, hint it's funny.

Labels: interesting links, Pop Culture