If you want to buy red roses this week in Saudi Arabia, you'll have to hit the black market, reports BBC News:

Saudi authorities consider Valentine's Day, along with a host of other annual celebrations, as un-Islamic. In addition to the prohibition on celebrating non-Islamic festivals, the authorities consider Valentine's Day as encouraging relations between men and women outside wedlock - punishable by law in the conservative kingdom.

With a ban on almost all things red, young lovers are having to get creative and to sneak around to observe the tradition. Flowers are being delivered under cover of night. It all sounds terribly romantic.

Of course, if you hate Valentine's Day and want to go someplace where you face almost no pressure to produce a teddy bear, here's your vacation destination.

Jon Stewart brings in old friend of the show John Bolton, you know this was going to be a great interview, especially if you remember the last time Bolton was on the show (March 2007,) Although Bolton made Stewart look like a fool, our favourite News man enjoyed the final laugh. Anyway, last nights interview was informative, lots of questions asked about the current American foreign policy et all...

Continue for part two....

So even after the intelligence said that Iran halted it's Nuke program in 2003, Iran is still a threat? How now? Oh, Terrorism, of course. Olbermann just recently had a rant about Bush and his Iran warmongering?

Bush's comments come appropriately while he is on a key middle eastern tour to promote "peace."

Headlines from around the World.
- George Bush Launches Scathing attack on Iran - AL-Jazeera (video)
- Bush Says Iran Sponsors Terror - BBC (Video)
- Bush to Court Saudi Allies after Warning Iran - AFP
- US, Israel on 'same page' on Iran - Jerusalem Post
- Bush urges Arab nations to confront Iran - Guardian UK

According to a news item on JustPressPlay.com, there are rumors floating around movie land that Morgan Spurlock, the director of Super Size Me, will be revealing something significant in his new documentary, Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden?

The item reads: Earlier this year at the Berlin International Film Festival, Morgan Spurlock made waves because he unveiled 15 minutes of footage from his mysterious documentary about Osama Bin Laden that was only shown to about 50 potential studio buyers after they had signed confidentiality agreements.

After a bidding frenzy, the Weinsteins bought it, and since then there's been rampant speculation that Spurlock presents information about where Bin Laden is.

Last week's National Enquirer put Condoleezza Rice on the cover, as part of a story titled "Who's Gay and Who's Not?" This London Times piece classes the Condi story with "the steady flow of salacious and often thinly sourced sex-related stories" that it sees in American media.

In some cases -- Rudy Giuliani using public funds to pay for his protection while visiting his girlfriend--it seems like you can make a case for this kind of information (or speculation) entering the public sphere. But the Condi Rice issue, well, I'm not sure why it's anyone's business. If she is gay and is part of an administration whose policies have been hostile to gay Americans, does that make her a hypocrite? Doesn't she have the right to be a hypocrite if it is part of preserving her privacy? Do other lesbians feel betrayed that she doesn't use her influence and her standing to make lesbianism more acceptable? It seems complicated, as does the Idaho Statesman's ongoing investigation of Larry Craig, which has now turned up many more men claiming to have had sex with Craig. Craig continues to deny the accusations, which makes him look increasingly foolish, but again, should sexual orientation even be part of the discussion?

There are two critical things that will happen within the next year that will decide the fate of this country. One is the 2008 election. I believe the current Republicans have slipped over the edge. They are authoritarians with serious fascist tendencies.

I was a Republican my whole life until the Bush administration and I was called fascist countless times, so I don't use the word lightly. Even Sandra Day O'Connor, the former Supreme Court Justice that put Bush into office warned about the beginnings of dictatorship in this country.

Republican nominees like Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney are constantly justifying and excusing torture, spying on innocent Americans, bombing countries that are absolutely no threat to us and running roughshod over the United States constitution. None of these are conservative principles. The Republican Party has become radicalized.

This story speaks for itself. Who knew Ayatollah Khomeini was into trannies?



By the way, notice how a lot of the Hollywood movies depict a lot of ancient Persians as transsexuals, too? They did this in Alexander and 300. Is this historical or just random bias against Persians?

And all kidding aside, I finished this thought on the show by saying how outrageous and brutal these laws are. This is one of the many reasons why it is the right impulse to bring liberal democracy to Iran. No one disagrees with that goal, the question is how you get there.

The smart approach isn't to bomb them into the arms of these same wacko fundamentalists. It's to lure them with blue jeans, McDonald's and Paris Hilton (okay, maybe not Paris, but you get the point). Let's do what America does best -- eat away at their culture with our corrosive freedoms. Capitalism, baby! Can't beat it.

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Last Friday anti-war Republican Chuck Hagel spoke with Bill Maher on HBO's Real Time. He spoke about his retirement, Iran, and the current state of the Republican Party. C&L says "Hagel's responses to Bill's questions were perhaps his strongest condemnation of the White House and this war yet."

Sad news to report from the wintry tundra: it appears the United Arab Emirates massive project "Burj Dubai" has reached 555 meters, which is two meters taller then the 30 year old Canadian phallus we call the CN Tower. This development dethrones the CN Tower as the largest free standing structure in the world. What this will do to the Canadian psyche? We'll have to wait and see.

Here is a random Youtube video with images of the Burj Dubai, but even more interesting is an image that highlights the massive commercial changes of Dubai between 1991 and 2005.

The US Air Force lost five nuclear warheads for three hours on August 30th. It turned out they were on a plane going from North Dakota to Louisiana. The military says the crew is responsible for not checking that the bomber was loaded with nukes. But who loaded the plane with bombs in the first place and why?

Former CIA analyst, Larry Johnson has a theory. We talk about it below.



What do you think? Harmless error or do we want the nukes in Louisiana for a reason? Remember The New Yorker has already reported that US Joint Chiefs of Staff threatened to resign if the Bush administration considered using nuclear weapons in a first strike against Iran.

Is the Bush administration that crazy? I think we are grossly underestimating how maniacal George Bush and Dick Cheney are. I believe they can do anything.

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Another day, another gaffe. The eight Iranians that the US detained earlier this week were released after it was revealed that they were invited to Iraq by the prime minister to discuss the construction of a new power plant.

BBC Reports:

Fox News Channel aggressively pushed for the Iraq War. And they got it. Now, they are doing the same exact thing with the Iran War. See video below for indisputable evidence. The question is, will they get what they're looking for again? Will we have another war started by Fox News Channel?



Of course, Fox can't do it alone. But lucky for them, they don't have to. Joe Lieberman, well-placed neo-cons in think tanks throughout DC (like Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack), Republicans in Congress and Dick Cheney are all working together to make this sick neo-con fantasy into a reality.

The question now is whether the rest of the media will be suckers enough to go along. You can see clear as day in the video above that Fox is following the same exact playbook they used to start a war with Iraq. But what helped tremendously that time was that the rest of the media bought it and actively helped them to promote it. So far, I haven't seen very much skepticism on the claims about Iran when I turn on TV, just like before the Iraq War.

After all of the hand wringing by the media about how they got it wrong in Iraq, I sure hope to God they aren't going to make the same exact mistake about Iran. So far, the signs are not encouraging. But Brave New Films, among others, are putting them on notice. Let's see, if they get it right this time.

I was on a press conference call this morning with Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films and Senator Bernie Sanders and Greenwald said that they have five more hours of footage just like this from just April of this year on. They out up an hour of it on their website. It's hard not to call Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes warmongers after seeing this footage. I wonder if they lose any sleep at all over the people killed in the senseless wars they start?

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This story from the WashingtonPost.com -- about the construction of the U.S. Embassy in Iraq -- is gut-wrenching. You don't want to believe stuff like this could happen in modern society, but it's impossible to ignore these testimonies.

Rory J. Mayberry, an emergency medical technician who worked briefly at the embassy site under a subcontract, testified that he was asked by First Kuwaiti managers to escort 51 Filipinos through the Kuwait airport and onto a flight to Baghdad. However, "all of our tickets said we were going to Dubai," he said, adding that a First Kuwaiti manager instructed him not to tell any of the Filipinos that they were going to Baghdad.

He said the men were basically "kidnapped by First Kuwaiti to work on the U.S. Embassy." Their passports had been confiscated, and they were driven away on buses after landing in Baghdad, then were "smuggled into the Green Zone," he said.

Here is the video of Mayberry's testimony in front of a congressional panel: "Allegations of Waste, Fraud, and Abuse at the New U.S. Embassy in Iraq."

I was looking for more videos about $592 Million embassy and I stumbled upon Jack Cafferty, the disgruntled grandfather on CNN.

Here's a short three minute clip from the documentary Eugene Jarecki film "Why We Fight." Chalmers Johnson explains the recent USA history of Middle Eastern oil.

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Incredible images here from the Guardian UK. ABC played this video on their network and issued a follow up of the response they got from viewers. Before you hit play keep in mind that the images are real and graphic.

The Guardian's award-winning photographer and filmmaker Sean Smith spent two months embedded with US troops in Baghdad and Anbar province. His harrowing documentary exposes the exhaustion and disillusionment of the soldiers.