The Article: Mad Dog Palin — The scariest thing about John McCain’s running mate isn’t how unqualified she is - it’s what her candidacy says about America by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone.

The Text: I’m standing outside the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. Sarah Palin has just finished her speech to the Republican National Convention, accepting the party’s nomination for vice president. If I hadn’t quit my two-packs-a-day habit earlier this year, I’d be chain-smoking now. So the only thing left is to stand mute against th fit-for-a-cheap-dog-kennel crowd-control fencing you see everywhere at these idiotic conventions and gnaw on weird new feelings of shock and anarchist rage as one would a rawhide chew toy.

The Article: Why was the Marriott Targeted? by Tariq Ali in Counterpunch.

The Text: The deadly blast in Islamabad was a revenge attack for what has been going on over the past few weeks in the badlands of the North-West Frontier. It highlighted the crisis confronting the new government in the wake of intensified US strikes in the tribal areas on the Afghan border.

Hellfire missiles, drones, special operation raids inside Pakistan and the resulting deaths of innocents have fuelled Pashtun nationalism. It is this spillage from the war in Afghanistan that is now destabilizing Pakistan.

The Article: What’s the difference between Palin and Muslim fundamentalists? Lipstick by Juan Cole at Salon.

The Text: John McCain announced that he was running for president to confront the “transcendent challenge” of the 21st century, “radical Islamic extremism,” contrasting it with “stability, tolerance and democracy.” But the values of his handpicked running mate, Sarah Palin, more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers. On censorship, the teaching of creationism in schools, reproductive rights, attributing government policy to God’s will and climate change, Palin agrees with Hamas and Saudi Arabia rather than supporting tolerance and democratic precepts. What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.

The Article: How Obama Reconciles Dueling Views on Economy by David Leonhardt in the New York Times Magazine.

The Text: I. A Broken Economy

As Barack Obama prepares to accept the Democratic nomination this week, it is clear that the economic policies of the next president are going to be hugely important. Ever since Wall Street bankers were called back from their vacations last summer to deal with the convulsions in the mortgage market, the economy has been lurching from one crisis to the next. The International Monetary Fund has described the situation as “the largest financial shock since the Great Depression.” The details are too technical for most of us to understand. (They’re too technical for many bankers to understand, which is part of the problem.) But the root cause is simple enough. In some fundamental ways, the American economy has stopped working.

The Article: McCain Doesn’t Have a Prayer by Matt Taibbi

The Text: Phoenix, July 13th, Sunday morning. Thank God John McCain has declared that he wants to wallpaper the continent with new nuke plants, because now the chances are better that this wretched slab of hot, birdshit-covered asphalt they call a state will be blown to hell in an accident someday. I hate this place. Once the sun comes up on an Arizona weekend, nothing moves except the occasional elderly-piloted Buick floating boatlike in the direction of some hideous megachurch.

The Article: From the Guardian, Where has all the rage gone? by Tariq Ali — a leader during the 1960’s, involved in the New Left.

The Text: A storm swept the world in 1968. It started in Vietnam, then blew across Asia, crossing the sea and the mountains to Europe and beyond. A brutal war waged by the US against a poor south-east Asian country was seen every night on television. The cumulative impact of watching the bombs drop, villages on fire and a country being doused with napalm and Agent Orange triggered a wave of global revolts not seen on such a scale before or since.

The Article: How a tiny West African country became the world’s first narco state by Ed Vulliamy in the Guardian.

The Text: The roads outside the X Club nightspot in Bissau, capital of the world’s fifth poorest country, are cracked and pot-holed. They have not been repaired since they were torn up by the tracks of military vehicles during Guinea-Bissau’s civil war of the late 1990s. But the cars that are parked outside - Porsche and Audi four-wheel drives - wouldn’t look out of place in the wealthiest quarters of London.

The Article: Study: Suicide bombers ‘not mentally unstable’ by Rhonda Spivak in Haaretz.

The Text: In an extensive study of Palestinian suicide bombings, three University of Toronto researchers have concluded that the bombers were not psychologically unstable and were often motivated by personal vengeance, not religious zeal.

The study was carried out by political sociologist Robert Brym, with the assistance of two Ph.d students, Palestinian Bader Araj and Israeli Yael Maoz-Shai.

Writing in the academic journal Social Forces, Brym noted, “The organizers of suicide attacks don’t want to jeopardize their missions by recruiting unreliable people. It may be that some psychologically unstable people want to become suicide bombers, but insurgent organizations strongly prefer their cannons fixed.”

The Article: A Statesman Without Borders by James Traub in today’s New York Times, on Bernard Kouchner, new foreign minister of France under Sarkozy’s presidency.

The Article: Obama and the Jewish question in yesterday’s edition of Haaretz, an Israeli daily newspaper. Obama and the Jewish question may substitute for Obama and the Israel/Palestine solution, as the self-removal of the pro-Israel right and other ’softer’ forms of Zionist lobbying from the campaign of who may well be America’s next President could mean a real partner at the peace negotiation table in the future. But one can only hope…

The Article: The Truth About Jena: Why America’s black-and-white narratives about race don’t reflect reality by Amy Waldman in the Atlantic.

The Article: Was Democracy Just A Moment?, part of Robert Kaplan’s collection of essay’s from The Coming Anarchy.

The Text: In the fourth century A.D. Christianity’s conquest of Europe and the Mediterranean world gave rise to the belief that a peaceful era in world politics was at hand, now that a consensus had formed around an ideology that stressed the sanctity of the individual. But Christianity was, of course, not static. It kept evolving, into rites, sects, and “heresies” that were in turn influenced by the geography and cultures of the places where it took root. Meanwhile, the church founded by Saint Peter became a ritualistic and hierarchical organization guilty of long periods of violence and bigotry. This is to say nothing of the evils perpetrated by the Orthodox churches in the East. Christianity made the world not more peaceful or, in practice, more moral but only more complex. Democracy, which is now overtaking the world as Christianity once did, may do the same.

The Article: A 1994 Atlantic article by Robert Kaplan entitled The Coming Anarchy. Weaving together elements of a world facing new demons, including environmental scarcity, renewed ethnic and tribal divisions, and the failures of the modern nation state, Kaplan writes a prosaic yet troubling outlook on the post Cold War political atlas. Many of his predictions have borne fruit, including his insights on the destabilization of Pakistan and the rise and entrenchment of the Islamic movement. A revistation of the Coming Anarchy provides one with relevant and timely perspectives on a world increasingly dominated by the stark divisions between the have’s and have not’s and the battle over scarce resources.

The Article: US Weapons at War by the Arms Trade Resource Center. And here I was, thinking that they hated our freedoms.

The Text: A new report by the New York-based World Policy Institute finds that a majority of U.S. arms sales to the developing world go to regimes defined as undemocratic by our own State Department. Furthermore, U.S.-supplied arms are involved in a majority of the world’s active conflicts.

“Billions of U.S. arms sales to Afghanistan in the 1980s ended up empowering Islamic fundamentalist fighters across the globe,” notes report co-author William D. Hartung. “Our current policy of arming unstable regimes could have similarly disastrous consequences, with U.S.-supplied weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, insurgents, or hostile governments.”

The Article: From the Guardian, comes The Original Political Vision: Sex, Art and Transformation by Terry Eagleton, detailing the vision of William Blake and that of Gordon Brown.

The Text: One reason Gordon Brown gave for not holding an election was to have time to roll out his vision. It is not a meaning of the word that Britain’s greatest revolutionary poet would have recognised; William Blake, born 250 years ago today, had what George Bush Sr called “the vision thing” in the way other people have headaches or fits of laughter. At four he glimpsed God’s head at the window, at eight a tree shimmering with angels. For Blake, being a visionary meant seeing beyond a version of politics centred chiefly on parliament. “House of Commons and House of Lords seem to me to be fools,” he wrote. “They seem to me to be something other than human life.”