PM Carpenter: Coming soon to an arrogant government very near you: Fiscal Armageddon

The president's nearly $3 trillion, 2008 budget proposal reads like a happy "how-to" manual for what Chalmers Johnson, the East Asian historian and thoughtful author of the eye-opening "Blowback" series, unhappily surveys:

We are on the brink of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation starts down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play -- isolation, overstretch, the uniting of local and global forces opposed to imperialism, and in the end bankruptcy.