Lately, I find myself in a bit of a funk. It all started with Patrick Fitzgerald riding in on his white horse and dishing out indictments left and right - at least, that's what everyone thought he would do. But that's not what happened.

There has also been a lot of talk lately about impeaching Bush and the rest of the corrupt gang in Washington. Given the rate at which things are progressing in the US at the moment, however, I suspect that in the not too distant future, I may be concluding my thoughts on the impeachment idea with another "But that's not what happened".

The question I keep turning over in my head is this: is it that not enough Americans can see what is going on in the US of A, or is it that enough Americans see, but aren't doing enough?

It is easy to see how the former could well be true. American society has always been one of ideals and saviors. The reality of the situation never mattered as much as the fact that one was working toward that ideal job or ideal moral plateau. Nowhere is this more evident than in the extreme religion that the Bush gang uses to garner support in its battle against a different "extreme" religion. Indeed, we might notice that "extremism" is the word of the decade. While many Americans seek saviors to preserve their way of life, the Bush gang warns of "dangerous extremists" - you know: "the Devil himself is at work here!" It's the black and white view that is so loved by the psychopaths in power, and it is one that has unfortunately been adopted by the masses. As long as the people believe they have a little slice of heaven, they won't want to rock the boat too much. It's all or nothing. While many citizens are pleasantly distracted by this little game, the government gets away with whatever it wants. Americans are on a "need to know" basis, and the Bush gang has decided America doesn't need to know a thing.

Today, Oil company Royal Dutch Shell reported a record annual profit for a UK-listed company of $22.94bn. This comes on top of similarly outrageous profits previously posted by other major oil exploration companies. Exxon Mobil for example made a staggering $36.1 billion in 2005. Where do these vast sums of money come from? Check your bank balance, that might give you a clue.

White House staff members, who are trying to prevent Iran from developing its own nuclear energy capacity and who refuse to take military action against Iran "off the table," have conveniently forgotten that the United States was the midwife to the Iranian nuclear program 30 years ago.

Every aspect of Iran's current nuclear development was approved and encouraged by Washington in the 1970s. President Gerald Ford offered Iran a full nuclear cycle in 1976. Moreover, the only Iranian reactor currently about to become operative, the reactor in Bushire (also known as Bushehr), was started before the Iranian revolution with U.S. approval, and cannot produce weapons-grade plutonium.

President Bush declared on June 25 that "we will not tolerate" a nuclear armed Iran. His words are empty. The physical evidence for a nuclear weapons program in Iran simply does not exist.

Oprah calls out a liar on corporate TV. Could it be her flames were meant for someone else?

The headlines of the corporate media in the US have been full of stories of another liar in recent days. The man's name is James Frey and his lies were contained in a book that he claimed was based on his life. Oprah Winfrey gave the book a recommendation, and that's when things went south. It came out that Mr. Frey had stretched the truth a bit in recounting some of the events in his past. He'd lied.

Well, poor Oprah went ballistic, and she called Mr. Frey back onto her show to give him a piece of her mind. She felt duped, and she had he courage to call out Mr. Frey on her show, an act so courageous that the pundits made certain it became headline material...for some book that will be forgotten in a year. Simply because he made her look bad. Poor Oprah's ego couldn't take it, and she had to set the record straight.

While browsing the news websites recently, I noticed an advertisement for an upcoming movie about Flight 93 that 'crashed' in the Pennsylvania countryside on September 11th 2001.

Here's the ad:

©Unknown

Gold closed at 558.90 dollars an ounce on Friday, up 0.9% from $553.80 at the previous week's close. The dollar closed at 0.8269 euros on Friday, up 0.3% from 0.8241 euros the week before. The euro, then, closed at 1.2094 dollars, compared to 1.2134 at the previous Friday's close. Gold in euros, then, would be 462.13 euros an ounce, up 1.3% from 456.40 the week before. Oil closed at 67.76 dollars a barrel, down 1.1% from $68.48 a barrel the Friday before. Oil in euros would be 56.03 down 0.7% from 56.44 euros a barrel the week before. The gold/oil ratio closed at 8.25 barrels of oil per ounce of gold, up 2.0% from 8.09 at the previous week's end. In the U.S. stock market, the Dow closed at 10,907.21 on Friday, up 2.2% from 10,667.39 the week before. The NASDAQ closed at 2,304.23 for the week, up 1.5% from 2,247.70. The yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note ended at 4.51%, up 16 basis points from 4.35 at the close of the previous week.

Gold continued its rise last week and the U.S. stock market rallied on Friday, regaining much of what it lost the previous Friday. Oil eased a bit as well.

Ask the average American citizen or citizen of a 'Western' country for their opinion on Afghanistan and they will likely offer thoughts along the lines of: "cruel treatment of women, brutal, fundamentalist Islamic Taliban regime, no education, no music." Followed by: "U.S. military, under the command of President Bush, liberated the Afghan people who now enjoy many more Western-style liberties."

Of course, this opinion did not magically spring from humanity's collective unconscious but was implanted into the mind of the average citizen by the U.S. government by way of the mainstream media. It should come as no shock therefore that such beliefs about the history of this Central Asian country are, at best, an extremely subjective interpretation of the facts, and at worst, an outright lie.

In 2005, Laura Bush graced Afghan soil and, referring to the previous Taliban regime, declared:

"It's very hard to imagine the idea of denying girls an education, of never allowing girls to go to school."

The only conclusion that we can draw from such a comment is that Laura is not much of a history fan, particularly the history of the latter part of the 20th century which concerns US foreign policy in Central Asia. If Laura had bothered to delve into the harder-to-find history books, she would have discovered the real reason that Afghan women were treated like cattle throughout the 1980's and 90's.

In a riveting display of modern technological efficiency that undoubtedly thrilled the editors of Popular Mechanics magazine, last Friday, by way of a Predator drone aircraft, the CIA fired missiles at a group of houses in a village on Pakistan's north-western border with Afghanistan. Eighteen Pakistani villagers, including women and children, were either blown to pieces, burned to death or crushed as their homes collapsed on top of them as they slept in their beds.

In his latest fireside chat with the western world, Osama has, yet again, gone to great lengths to support the "war on terror" propaganda of the Bush government.

Let's have a look at some excerpts:

[...] "I plan to speak about the repeated errors your President Bush has committed in comments on the results of your polls that show an overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. But he (Bush) has opposed this wish and said that withdrawing troops sends the wrong message to opponents, that it is better to fight them (bin Laden's followers) on their land than their fighting us (Americans) on our land."

Indeed, Bush did say that the invasion of Iraq was about fighting the "war on terror" and that al-Qaeda is in Iraq. So we would of course expect Osama to counter such claims and tell us the real reason for the US invasion of Iraq, right? Think again, this guy isn't getting paid to contradict the Bush government!

Osama: "I can reply to these errors by saying that war in Iraq is raging with no let-up, and operations in Afghanistan are escalating in our favor, thank God"