alias Bruce.

Introducing Poemmentary.com.

It's news headlines and political commentary -- but exclusively through poetry. Wherever it is found, seen, heard, or scrawled. Its motto is "Freed Speech."

For a different kind of reporting,  go to Poemmentary.com. The April 6th story, for instance, is "Illegal Immigration Is A Touchstone For Anger."

I launched the site this week after years of daydreaming about it. There is much, much more to come. In all kinds of directions. Please visit as it grows.

The U.S. is not willing to do anything meaningful about ISIS.

This is not an ideological claim. It's a fact.

Mere air power against ISIS is doomed to fail, as most of us have thought from the start and as Kurdish fighters have now said out loud. You cannot fight a war without fighting a war. Air power alone, unless you are willing to reduce an entire region to dust with nuclear weapons, is not a war and it will not win.

A U.S.-led ground war is not an option. Neither the U.S. nor any other major power has the resolve or the capacity to take the kinds of awful casualties that ground combat with ISIS would mean. Nor would a ground war change the dynamics that led ISIS to gain recruiting appeal and structural power.

And changing the actual situation that fostered the growth of ISIS -- that situation being a global corporate sucking machine that leaves huge portions of the world's population unpaid for their regions' riches and throttled in their desire for dignity -- is also off the table in the West. There is simply too much money to be made from corrupt extractive economies in the Middle East, Africa and South America.

So there is basically nothing that President Barack Obama, his corporate backers, and his cooperative "allies" are willing to do that will actually beat back ISIS. Nothing. Despite ongoing beheadings, the now tortuously familiar appeals by Western families for their hostage loved ones to be spared, and ground gains by ISIS in areas conquered through force of armed ruthlessness and abdicated governance.

Obama will speak with righteous fury and will act with hog-tied resignation. He has no good options and he knows it. He and his sponsors will wait, watch, and take what losses they feel they must. The winner, as before, will be whatever satisfactorily profitable arrangement Western capital can manage with this latest convolution in a portion of the brown-skinned world.

It's the cost of doing business.

The problem with nuclear power

is that its inherent danger – radiation – is simply too great a liability for it to be a viable long-term source of energy.

To be sure, no energy source is immune to natural or man-made disasters. Earthquakes happen. So do floods, tsunamis, accidents, malfunctions, human errors, fires, and terrorist and military attacks.

The difference between nuclear power and other major energy generators, though, is this: When a coal or hydroelectric or wind or solar plant blows up, there is a conflagration and a loss of power and perhaps an awful loss of life in the immediate area. But when a nuclear plant blows up or melts down, there is a threat to life for a radius of potentially thousands of miles affecting possibly millions of people for decades or longer.

A disaster with non-nuclear energy is a terrible thing. But for all practical purposes – as the jewelry ads once said about diamonds – a nuclear disaster is forever.

No matter what the nuclear industry and a corporate-corralled President Obama tell you about the "necessity" and the "safety" of American nuclear power, you should know that when some awe-inspiring calamity wrecks a nuclear facility in New York or Michigan or California, we will fare little better than Japan, and perhaps worse. Any gambler knows to never put more on the table than you are prepared to lose. Nuclear power, by its very nature, puts more at risk than we are actually ready to give up. It sets up consequences that we are unwilling to live with, and it, foolishly, props them up against forces we cannot control. It is a classic case of the worship of pure luck.

If we continue to significantly rely upon nuclear power, the question of a true nuclear disaster in America is not if, but when.

NYT: "Oil Soars as Libyan Furor Shakes Markets."

More than ever, it's time to shop for a hybrid or an electric.

"The newly elected House Speaker John Boehner on Wednesday

promised a new era of transparency..." – New York Times, 1/6/2011

And if you believe that promise, you're proof that Americans are as dumb as much of the world thinks we are. This pledge of Republican-led "transparency" comes from the same folks who sat on their hands while Vice President Dick Cheney crafted energy policy in secret meetings with industry reps and defied subpoenas to reveal their names; who (like many Dems) have happily allowed corporate lobbyists to literally write the text of bills; who cheered President G.W. Bush as he lied the nation into war; and who continue to lie in service of the perpetually failed idea that giving the rich more money to put in the bank creates jobs. Transparency? Good luck with that.

BP's threat that an offshore drilling ban would prevent it from making oil spill payouts,

as reported in the NYT, is like something from a bad mafia movie.

How much lower can this bottom-feeder sink?

Laughing Gas.

Thanks to Darryl Moment for passing along this cache of cartoons: