America, with 1,516 U.S. fatalities in Iraq as of March 16, 2005, pays little public attention to its war dead. Indeed, aside from the printed obituaries in metro sections of dailies, there is little acknowledgment by the government or substantial reporting in the media of the soldiers who perish in Iraq and the families they leave behind. We do not see or hear them. They die alone on the hot sands of Iraq and their survivors grieve privately on American soil.

A British resident has claimed he was tortured by US guards at Guantanamo Bay, suffering violent sexual assaults, near drowning and an attack in which he was blinded.

In today’s op/ed column in the New York Times, David Books places blame for the dissolution of national discourse, for

As the U.S. government’s budget deficit tops $2.2 TRILLION, Bush made the following statement at the signing ceremony for the credit industry relief bill (known in Congress at the Bankruptcy Reform Bill): “Bankruptcy should always be a last resort in our legal system. If someone does not pay his or her debts, the rest of society ends up paying them.”

OK, so we know that Tom DeLay isn’t all that fond of crazy activist judges like, say, the seven Republican appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court who went along with the “murder” of Terri Schiavo.