The media bullhorn given to the plutocrats and Villagers-for-life continues its free profitable and responsibility-free call for our destruction. They get to make ALL the money, they get to be the ONLY voice that matters, and they get to pick the targets when we need to bomb yet another country so we don’t get rusty.

And who better than Evan Bayh to emit the dreck?

The Middle East’s two key exports these days seem terribly at odds with each other: oil, the lifeblood of the global economic order, and political unrest, in the form of protest movements rolling across the region. Occasionally, though, oil and dissent can mix, and workers may be channeling a bit of the Arab Spring into the petrol empires of Iraq and Iran.

Sources close to actor Sean Penn confirmed that the actor played a huge part in the release of hikers Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer from an Iranian prison where they had been held for over two years. The duo, along with friend Sarah Shourd, were captured by Iranian troops and charged with espionage when they got lost hiking along the Iraq-Iran border.

Wonderful, stupendous, long-overdue news if true.

Demonstrations continue in Bahrain, even as Saudi Arabia and the US weigh in to quiet them.

William Ockham, who knows a whole lot more about coding than many of us, shares some interesting thoughts with us about the Stuxnet virus in this post.

Obviously the shutdown of the Internet or the threat to have the military fire on its own people didn’t save Egypt’s now-former president Hosni Mubarak. But they provide the building blocks for how other nations might handle this crisis, out of the watchful eye of the world. This could already be happening in Iran, or Libya, or Bahrain. Mubarak may not have saved his own autocracy, but he may end up saving others.

The Egyptian uprising has not yet ended, and with the military banning labor strikes and workers energized by the spark of revolution not heeding this call and demonstrating for better pay and conditions, we clearly have a long way to go before that country’s affairs are settled. The role of labor in the uprising is unique and fascinating, and deserves more scrutiny. For now, however, let’s spin around the globe.

In The People Reloaded, Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel have put together a collection of essays that help explain what happened. Though both are unabashed supporters of the Green Movement, and their anthology makes the case from that angle, it does so based on the perspectives of some of the leading scholars, analysts, and journalists who have been following Iran, many of them for decades.

He’s a serious person, a seriously deluded person.