US politics

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s death at 88 is an occasion for me to recall some of my own writing on his sinister role in the Iraq War. Rumsfeld wanted to invade Iraq so badly he just made up shit to justify that action. In a Salon article I […]

Epidemics

An All-American Horror Story: How we Sacrificed our Health on the Altar of useless Nuclear Arsenals

Tom Engelhardt

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Yes, once upon a time I regularly absorbed science fiction and imagined futures of wonder, but mainly of horror. What else could you think, if you read H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds under the covers by flashlight while your parents thought you were asleep? Of course, that novel was a […]

Authoritarianism

Top 6 Things Trump should be Indicted for aside from Cheating on Taxes

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) The Trump organization was indicted by a New York grand jury on Wednesday and the indictment is unsealed today, according to Shayna Jacobs, Josh Dawsey, David A. Fahrenthold and Jonathan O’Connell at WaPo. The Trump Org.’s CFO, Allen Weisselberg, was also indicted. Trump himself is not named, but the trial could […]

censorship

America wants to be known in Mideast as Champion of Free Speech, so Why is it Censoring Iranian Websites?

Farhang Jahanpour

Oxford (Special to Informed Comment) – The Bureau of Industry and Security, an agency of the United States Department of Justice, in a statement on Tuesday 22 June announced that it had seized 33 websites and news outlets used by the Iranian Islamic Radio and Television Union (IRTVU), and another three run by the “Iran-backed” […]

Anti-War Movement

What Price “Defense”? America’s Nearly $1.3 Trillion National Security Budget Isn’t Making Us Any Safer

Tomdispatch

By Mandy Smithberger and William Hartung | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – President Biden’s first Pentagon budget, released late last month, is staggering by any reasonable standard. At more than $750 billion for the Defense Department and related work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy, it represents one of the highest levels of […]

Joe Biden

Cold War Nostalgia is not a Policy: Joe Biden needs a New, less Militaristic Vision for America

Andrew J. Bacevich

“I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.” — Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Kurt Vonnegut’s famous novel about the World War II bombing of the German city of Dresden appeared the year I graduated from West Point. While dimly […]

Far Right

Gaslighting the Pentagon: Tucker Carlson, who called Iraqis ‘Monkeys,’ Poses as anti-Racist in defending White Supremacy from “Pig” Gen. Milley

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Fox white nationalist (there, I’ve been redundant and repeated myself) Tucker Carlson once called Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys,” managing to be racist, anti-Arab and Islamophobic all at once. Now Carlson is posing as an anti-racist. Funny thing, though. He isn’t out there apologizing for his racism against Iraqis. Then there […]

censorship

Sounds Like Fascism: Florida’s DeSantis to Collect Political Views of Professors to defund “Hotbeds of stale Ideology”

Common Dreams

By Julia Conley, staff writer | – ( Commondreams.org) – Democratic lawmakers and educators nationwide are expressing alarm over legislation signed this week by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis which is ostensibly aimed at ensuring college students and educators in the state feel permitted to express a variety of political views—and which critics say could end […]

African-Americans

If we truly honored Juneteenth, we would end the exception in the 13th amendment

Waging Nonviolence

By Emma Jordan-Simpson | – (Waging Nonviolence ) – In my inbox this morning from a major nonprofit organization that should have known better was a Juneteenth celebratory greeting: “We proudly celebrate Juneteenth, the day slavery finally came to an end throughout the South — historically a monumental feat for American history and now a […]