"'It's a draft, plain and simple. I don't care what they call it,' Steven told me as our plane landed at LAX. 'I didn't sign up for the Navy to be in the Army. But I'm going because I don't feel I have a choice. I have children to feed and a mortgage to pay.'"

"The U.S. is rapidly becoming a police state and the days are approaching in which population control techniques used in Fallujah and Iraq will be used in Des Moines and Charlottesville. Americans will soon be issued national identity cards and the government will develop the technical ability to track movements of all individuals."

"The country presents a variety of scenery and geology, from black basaltic mountains to beautiful green valleys, from brightly hued sandstone highlands to arid flat deserts. The country is divided on a north-south axis by the old Turkish railway line, with the west mostly mountainous but fertile (in fact, it is part of the ancient Fertile Crescent) and the east a flat plateau of mainly desert."

"In the late nineteenth century, the advanced Western nations had opened a lethal weapons gap with their automatic weapons: this gave them a quick, nearly costless colonization of Africa and Southeast Asia. When that gap began to close in the interwar period, it gave an impetus to resistance movements in Indonesia, Vietnam, Kenya and Algeria. Already weakened from fighting their own fratricidal wars, the Western colonial powers retreated: and the Third World was born."

"The independence of the Obama campaign from right-wing Christians and pro-Israel lobbyists bodes well for many hoping that such a presidency can be more balanced than the current administration in its approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Contrasted with the quickly-fading promises of President Bush for a peace treaty in 2008, Obama's candidacy is welcomed."

"Arab League members know that they can’t stop the satellite broadcasts but are hoping that this charter will legitimize the restrictions in national capitals of the less fortunate satellite broadcasters who find that working in the Middle East is cheaper than broadcasting from Italy or London. If and when these new regulations are enforced on these poorer broadcasters, they will likely regroup and emigrate to the west, adding yet another layer to the brain drain and doing little to stop their broadcasts."

If President Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower returned from the grave, he would be appalled by today’s Military-Industrial Complex, a/k/a, “The Complex.” In 1961, the old warrior, warned the nation about the “unwarranted influence” of that insidious combination of forces: the Pentagon, Defense contractors and the Congress. Nick Turse’s new book, “The Complex: How The Military Invades Our Everyday Lives,” is a wake up call about that current danger.

"The key point that emerges from considering these very different electoral experiences is that elections on their own signify very little. The institutional framework and political context in which they take place are everything. In America, the economic-military-political elites are so secure in their dominance that they can allow the people a full role in their maneuverings, confident that whoever wins will represent their interests before anyone else’s. In Pakistan the US has a similar role; in Malaysia UMNO is so entrenched in the institutions of power and the state that the elections by which it legitimises its position have become only measures of dissatisfaction with it."