Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment) – January 6 was Donald Trump’s ultimate, cathartic, lifetime adrenalin high. He enjoyed it so much from the White House dining room that it took more than three hours for his staff and family to talk him down and out of it. He had calculated and stage-managed that day […]
The Trump Mob: Do the January 6 Hearings Set the Stage for a RICO Prosecution?
The January 6 Committee hearings are the most compelling thing in American History since Watergate, and I’m so old I attended the hearing on two different days. It was my good fortune to have a Congressional internship in DC that summer. This is Watergate to the power of infinity . . . or google. Chair […]
Theocracy: Supreme Court backing for Coerced Christian Prayer in Schools Harms Rights of Jews and other Minorities
Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment) – In one of its recent flurry of dismaying decisions, the radical Supreme Court overturned church and state boundaries, making public school student athletes subject to oppressive pressure from coaches and peers to participate in things possibly repugnant to them. The most important core ideal of the Founding Fathers […]
How Far Right Legislators are Criminalizing Homelessness and Recreating Debtors’ Prisons to Please the Rabid Trump Base
In today’s America, it is increasingly difficult to tell government officials from criminals. A case in point is the Tennessee legislature, which just criminalized homelessness as a felony , which is surely is a crime against man, nature, humanity and natural law. As of July 1, it will be a felony in Tennessee to camp […]
SCOTUS Dispensing with Roe v. Wade Is Attack on Religious Freedom and Jewish Law
Oakland (Special to Informed Comment) – The leaked SCOTUS draft to overturn Roe v. Wade leaves a lot to unpack. For Jews, Muslims and other religious minorities, this is a threat to religious liberty in general. Jewish law, (Halacha), does not consider the fetus to be a being with a soul until it is born, […]
How the most Powerful Israel Lobby started Preferring anti-Democratic White Christian Nationalism to American Jews
Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment) – The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC, the major coordinator of thousands of organizations making up the Israel lobbies, can no longer call itself “non-partisan.” That they would openly endorse 37 Republican Members of Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 Election quashes any notion of non-partisan standing. […]
Putin’s “Nazi” pretext for his Brutal Invasion of Ukraine Insults the Memory of Holocaust Victims
“No monument stands over Babi Yar . . .,” so begins a tragic poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko; “only a step cliff like the rudest headstone . . . “* That is the site near Kiev where 33,000 Jews were murdered by Nazi death squads (Einsatzgruppen) on September 29-30, 1941. No genocide has occurred within Ukraine […]
Jared Kushner’s Sham “Abraham Accords” unleashed more ME Conflict, and don’t Deserve a Nobel
Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment) – Jared Kushner’s nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, for authoring the Abraham Accords (along with his deputy Avi Berkowitz), is a sham. The Abraham Accords are not a comprehensive peace plan, but a self-serving scheme that sows the seeds of war for future generations. It is a series […]
Race, Religion and Whoopi Goldberg: Her Mistake on Judaism Pales before that of Trump
Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment) – It’s time to stop flogging Whoopi Goldberg, and re-examine the semantics of Judaism as a race or religion. She is NOT anti-Semitic. She said something reckless, but her mistake was not explaining herself well, on a complex topic that most people are ill-informed about to begin with. On […]