As a direct result of the illegal United States-led attack on Gaddafi and the subsequent coup, pan-Islamic fundamentalists killed the U.S. ambassador and three other American diplomats in Benghazi, Libya Tuesday, on the anniversary of 9/11. As anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan recently noted, "Libya today is the creation of the U.S., NATO, and al Qaeda, acting in a criminal partnership."

The Obama administration referred to their efforts that led to the unleashing of al Qaeda and other Islamic fundamentalists in Libya as a "kinetic humanitarian action." In reality, it was regime change, a hi-jacking of resources, and an illegal war.

Libya, under Gaddafi, was stable. Gaddafi had nationalized Libyan oil resources and his nation had one of the highest standards of living in Africa and in the Middle East. At the time he was overthrown by the U.S.-led coalition, he was busy promoting an African currency and a continental development bank to liberate all the natural resources of Africa from the International Monetary Fund. In fact, Gaddafi bragged that he was the first state leader to issue an international arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden.

To your average educated careful consumer of U.S. news media, our militarism looks like ad hoc reactionary responses. A crisis flairs up here. We "intervene" there. An irrational foreign dictator threatens the peace over yonder. We get into wars because we have no choice, and then continue them because ending them would be somehow even worse than continuing them.

In fact, there is a method to the madness. I don't mean just the pressure that President Eisenhower warned us would be created by massive military spending. I mean that the war planners have planned far ahead. They have lists of upcoming wars. (In 2001, according to Wesley Clark, the Pentagon sought wars in the coming years with Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. Tony Blair independently confirmed a similar list.) They invent the public excuses for those wars as the need arises. The actual motivations are not humanitarian, but driven by a crazed desire to dominate the world's economies, waterways, and fossil fuels.

The first direct anti-fracking action in Southeast Ohio ended shortly before noon on Tuesday June 26, 2012 when Madeline ffitch voluntarily released herself from concrete barrels blocking the gate to a Class 2 Injection Well on Ladd Ridge Road in Athens County. Having occupied the spot for almost 6 ½ hours her decision to unlock herself came after the arrival of an airlifted Highway Patrol tactical team from Columbus took over operations from Albany police, Albany fire department, county sheriff, Athens fire department, ODNR wildlife officers already present. Choosing to release herself rather than endanger either herself or the officers present, ffitch declared the action a victory. The injection well was closed for half a day, media spread through out the state, and attention was brought to the negligence of our regulating bodies, including lack of nonbiased testing, not enforcing weight restrictions on local bridges, and allowing brine to deliveries to exceed daily limits.

No, it’s not the brutal, hate-twisted racism of the old days. Today’s Republicans are capable of adoring select right-wing African-Americans. The Jim Crow revival they’re pushing — the large-scale disenfranchisement of primarily minority voters — is pragmatic.

They’re outnumbered. They couldn’t win a fair national election. What a dilemma for such a righteous political organization. Winning — securing power, implementing their agenda — is the whole point, and that means they have no choice but to put the big squeeze on Democrat-leaning voting blocs. And the most obvious of those blocs are racial and ethnic.

Democracy is as vulnerable to abuse when it’s several centuries old as when it’s brand new. And though the United States proudly waves its flag as the world’s oldest democracy, at the beginning that concept was seriously limited — to white, male property owners. And as enfranchisement spread, a tradition of virulent vote suppression spread right along with it. Democracy is never far from its own demise.

The death of Reverend Sun Myung Moon hopefully ends one of the strangest chapters in U.S. security industrial complex history. The self-proclaimed "Messiah" who owned dozens of businesses including Kahr Arms, and who once claimed to have presided over Jesus' wedding posthumously in order to get the Christian savior into heaven, was ultimately a front in the United States for friends in the CIA like George Herbert Walker Bush.

Moon founded the Washington Times newspaper in 1982 and the Washington Post went out of its way to avoid any mention of the "the dark side of the Moon" upon his death Monday, September 3, 2012 at age 92. When George W. Bush faltered in New Hampshire in early 2000, it was Moon's shadowy cultish right-wing network that came to its rescue in South Carolina. Moon's forces helped turn a certain primary defeat into a double-digit victory by spreading Moonies, his zombie-like followers, throughout the state. As the Washington Post reported, "An array of conservative groups have come to reinforce Bush's message with phone banks, radio ads, and mailings of their own."