Old Mother Hubbert

Greg Palast's new book, Armed Madhouse, is being sold in two different covers on different sides of the Atlantic. As you'd expect from the land of puritan bowdlerizing and neurotic dithering, the American cover is a pale, gelded version of the British one. Palast is predictably irate, and spraying ammo:

"These are dispatches from the front lines of the class war.

Here is our new world of militarized greed, where America’s panic over lunatics with box-cutters has metastasized into a billion-dollar fear industry; where Republicans sucking on Super-sized Slurpies® are hunting dark-skinned voters to eliminate their rights; where James Baker’s fixer in alligator boots sets up the grab for Iraq’s oil on her way to the rodeo; where miners are suffocated by the same investment bankers who are siphoning off auto workers’ pensions."

Love him or hate him, he brings a refreshingly confrontational approach to dealing with the outrages of the last few decades, and since playing nice and acting "grown-up" have turned out to be such pitiful responses for liberals, maybe it's time to learn a thing or two from the ad hominum king. You can catch him on his tour, and ask him what the hell he has against the Hubbert Curve.