By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Somehow Secretary of Energy Rick Perry managed to find Africa, and while he was there, he learned that a lot of people don’t have electricity. In a news conference this week, he expressed the opinion that fossil fuels would prevent sexual assault. Perry said, assaulting and […]
Iran’s Khamenei to Putin: Isolate US by dumping the Dollar
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The president of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin visited Tehran on Wednesday for consultations with President Hassan Rouhani and the country’s clerical leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei is quoted by Tahrir [Liberation] as saying that Russia and Iran could cooperate to isolate the United States and […]
Dear Sean Hannity: Allahu Akbar is in the Catholic Catechism
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Sean Hannity manages to combine being sneaky with being a bully. You think of a bully as maybe too straightforward, someone who hulks over others glaring and tries to impose his will on them. It is the 89 pound weakling we think of as sneaky, going […]
Dear John Kelly: Yes, Slavery was wrong in 1860s & Muslims helped Convince Americans to end It
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – John Kelly’s ignorant remarks about the Civil War and compromise on Laura Ingraham’s show have rightly angered a lot of people. One of the arguments he made was for historical relativism: ““I think we make a mistake, though, and as a society and certainly as, as […]
Is Bin Laden Shaping America more than our Founding Fathers?
By Tom Engelhardt | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – – Honestly, if there’s an afterlife, then the soul of Osama bin Laden, whose body was consigned to the waves by the U.S. Navy back in 2011, must be swimming happily with the dolphins and sharks. At the cost of the sort of spare change that Donald […]
That Time when Muslim Tunisia advised the Antebellum US to Abolish Slavery
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Revised classroom version Some observers imply that in 1861, most people in the world believed in slavery and so you can’t blame the American South for retaining it. This premise is not true. For one thing, a majority of American states had abolished slavery. Ohio did […]
No Compromise: Let’s not forget Kelly’s ‘Empty Barrel’ Smear
By Gail Ukockis | (Informed Comment) | – – “Oh, no. No. Never. Well, I’ll apologize if I need to. But for something like that, absolutely not. I stand by my comments.” This was the response by General John Kelly when asked on Monday night whether he was going to apologize to Representative Wilson for […]
Upshot of Mueller Probe: Putin did to US what we did to Iran and Iraq
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The indictment of George Papadopoulos, the foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign in 2016, for lying to the FBI is the most important news that came out Monday. What he lied about was the timeline of his contacts with the Russian Federation on behalf of […]
Climate Emergency: Heat Trapping Gases make largest Jump in recorded history
TeleSur | (Informed Comment) | – – Carbon dioxide or CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have reached unprecedented high levels, a United Nations watchdog group reports, warning that urgent measures are needed to achieve the targets set by the Paris climate agreement and avoid cataclysmic changes in the earth’s climate conditions. “Concentrations of carbon dioxide […]
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