Alan Bock, columnist and the senior writer for the editorial page of the Orange County Register will be the featured guest tomorrow, 1:15PM Eastern.

Alan Bock will be discussing his recent column on Antiwar.com , Getting It Wrong Again.

Alan Bock has been a speaker at the Cato Institute, Reason Foundation, the Drug Policy Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Freedom Summit, the Liberty Editors’ Conference and the Festival of Freedom. Prior to coming to the Register he spent eight years in Washington, D.C., where he worked for two congressmen and formed Libertarian Advocate, a libertarian lobbying organization whose organizing banquet featured speeches by Karl Hess and Wain Dawson.

The show airs Monday through Friday from 12PM-2PM Eastern on KAOS 92.7FM. Additional feeds and podcasts available at Antiwar Radio.

The site has been updated to WordPress 2.5, which has changed the dashboard considerably, and for the better. I am staying with the default WordPress dashboard theme for the forseeable future. WordPress’s lead designer, Matt Mullenweg, created a short screencast of himself using the new dashboard to post and add images or galleries to a post. This may answer any questions you have about how this is done. I encourage you all to take advantage of the new features. The screencast can be found here:

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/wordpress-25-rc2/

Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology at SUNY-Stony Brook will be the featured guest on the Scott Horton Show at Antiwar Radio, 12:15PM Eastern, Monday, March 31. Listen live at KAOS 95.9FM.

Michael Schwartz will be discussing his article, How to Disintegrate a City.

Schwartz has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on US business and government dynamics. His work has appeared at Asia Times, MotherJones.com, TomDispatch, and ZNet, and in Against the Current, Contexts, International Socialist Review, Socialist WorkerZ magazine. His books include Radical Politics and Social Structure, and The Power Structure of American Business.

March 28, 2008

Amy Goodman Questions Sen. Obama on Heeding Iraqis’
Call for Full US Withdrawal

Following his speech on the economy at New York’s
Cooper Union, Amy Goodman asks Sen. Barack Obama why
he is not calling for a total withdrawal of US troops
from Iraq in accordance with the 70 percent of Iraqis
who say they want the US out. [includes rush
transcript]

Sen. Barack Obama, Democratic presidential candidate.
—————————————————–
AMY GOODMAN: Obama was speaking at the Cooper Union. I
had a chance to briefly interview him as he was
shaking people’s hands after he left the stage. I
asked Obama why he’s not calling for a total
withdrawal of US troops from Iraq in accordance with
the 70 percent of Iraqis who say they want the US out.

AMY GOODMAN: Senator Obama, quick question: 70 percent
of Iraqis say they want the US to withdraw completely;
why don’t you call for a total withdrawal?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, I do, except for our embassy.
I call for amnesty and protecting our civilian
contractors there.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve said a residual force—

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah, but—

AMY GOODMAN: —which means [inaudible] thousands
[inaudible].

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, no. I mean, I don’t think
that you’ve read exactly what I’ve said. What I said
is that we do need to have a strike force in the
region. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in Iraq; it
could be in Kuwait or other places. But we do have to
have some presence in order to not only protect them,
but also potentially to protect their territorial
integrity.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you call for a ban on the private
military contractors like Blackwater?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: I’ve actually—I’m the one who
sponsored the bill that called for the investigation
of Blackwater in [inaudible], so—

AMY GOODMAN: But would you support the Sanders one
now?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Here’s the problem: we have 140,000
private contractors right there, so unless we want to
replace all of or a big chunk of those with US troops,
we can’t draw down the contractors faster than we can
draw down our troops. So what I want to do is draw—I
want them out in the same way that we make sure that
we draw out our own combat troops. Alright? I mean, I—

AMY GOODMAN: Not a ban?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, I don’t want to replace those
contractors with more US troops, because we don’t have
them, alright? But this was a speech about the
economy.

AMY GOODMAN: The war is costing $3 trillion, according
to Stiglitz.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: That’s what—I know, which I made a
speech about last week. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Senator Barack Obama at the
Cooper Union in New York.

————————–

“Boo, hoo, I don’t want to answer questions about the war anymore. This speech was about the economy.”

–Good for you, Ms. Goodman.

And thanks to Kev.

First hour, renowned historian Gareth Porter on warring Shi’ite factions.

Dr. Porter is the author of Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam. Tomorrow, 12:15PM Eastern.

At 1:15PM Eastern, David Case will be discussing his recent Mother Jones article, The U.S. Military’s Assassination Problem.

Case, a freelance journalist, has written for Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, and National Geographic Adventure. He was formerly the executive director of TomPaine.com. More of Case’s work can be found at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Tomorrow’s show can be heard live on KAOS 95.9FM or at Antiwar Radio by clicking “Listen to Scott Horton live (9-11am Pacific)” during the broadcast. Additional feeds and podcasts available at Antiwar Radio within 24 hours of air date.

The Resinous Bastard, DJ No Home and the gang have set up a new website for KAOS Radio.

Check it out.

Looks like they got the archives of the whole show going fer ya too.

Rolling Stone contributing editor Jenny Eliscu will be the featured guest on the Scott Horton Show at Antiwar Radio, Thursday, March 27 at 12:15PM Eastern. Eliscu will be discussing her recent Rolling Stone article, The Troubled Homecoming of the Marlboro Marine.

Eliscu is a contributing editor and music critic for Rolling Stone magazine. She hosts Left of Center on Sirius Satellite Radio. Eliscu is also the author of Schools that Rock: The Rolling Stone College Guide.

For the second hour, John McGlynn, an independent economic and financial analyst, will discuss, The March 20, 2008 US Declaration of War on Iran, from Japan Focus, an Asian Pacific e-journal.

Is available here. Their newest documentary “Bush’s War,” is here.