Featured

(By Juan Cole) The Ft. Hood shooter who left 3 victims dead yesterday had been being assessed for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He had served for 4 months at the tail end of the Iraq War in 2011 and suffered from anxiety and depression. A staggering 1 million veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars have […]

Featured

Palestine’s Abbas finally says will Go to UN over Israeli Squatters

Juan Cole

(By Juan Cole) Palestine president Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday signed a some 15 international treaties and UN legal instruments, including the Geneva Conventions, in preparation for going to the International Criminal Court over Israel’s illegal flooding of hundreds of thousands of Israeli squatters into the West Bank. These squatters have for the most part never […]

Climate Change

“Some say the world will end in fire:” Climate Panel Paints Mad Max World of Famine, Fire, War

Juan Cole

(By Juan Cole) The poet Robert Frost wrote, “Fire and Ice Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction […]

Featured

Pace Sheldon Adelson: Top 5 Signs West Bank is Occupied Territory

Juan Cole

(By Juan Cole) New Jersey governor and presidential hopeful Chris Christie used the term “Occupied Territories” to refer to Gaza and the West Bank in his talk this weekend to Sheldon Adelson’s “Republican Jewish Coalition” in Las Vegas. He was forced to apologize to the uber right wing Adelson. Now the far right billionaires want […]

Featured

The Shame of American Politics: GOP Presidential Hopefuls now Trek to Las Vegas seeking Adelson Blessing

Juan Cole

(By Juan Cole) A series of pro-corporation Supreme Court decisions and the latter’s disingenuous equation of money with speech, including “Citizens United”, have turned the United States from a democracy to a plutocracy. It is not even a transparent plutocracy, since black money (of unknown provenance) has been allowed by SCOTUS to flood into elections. […]

Featured

Saudi King channels John McCain, demands Obama Take Hard Line on Iran, Syria, Muslim Brotherhood

Juan Cole

(By Juan Cole) President Barack Obama met late Friday with King Abdullah b. Abd al-Aziz of Saudi Arabia at the latter’s desert camp, flying out from Riyadh by helicopter. The tensions between Saudi Arabia and the United States have come about in part because Riyadh, after being skittish about George W. Bush’s muscular Neoconservatism in […]

Barack Obama

Is Pope Francis good for the Democrats? Obama in the Vatican

Juan Cole

(By Juan Cole) Could enormous popularity of Pope Francis spill over into American politics? Pope Francis is worried about inequality, a Democratic Party issue, and his statements and actions on the subject are a stunning rebuke to “evangelical Catholics” such as Paul Ryan, who tend rather to celebrate economic inequality or to deny it or […]

Egypt

Egypt: Al-Sisi’s run for President: Bonapartism and Gulf Oil Money

Juan Cole

(By Juan Cole) Egypt’s Brig. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, 59, on Wednesday resigned his military commission and announced that he will run for president. He was given a long spot on Egyptian television to make the announcement, still wearing his uniform (he said it was the last time he would be seen in it after […]

Eastern Europe

Is Russia a “Regional Power” or “Geopolitical Threat”? Obama argues with Romney from the Hague

Juan Cole

(By Juan Cole) The peculiar American two-party system followed President Obama to the Hague on Tuesday, where he gave a joint press conference with the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, leader of a Neoliberal, market-oriented party with a secular orientation. Obama was asked about the Ukraine, and replied from across the Atlantic to Mitt Romney’s […]