US politics

( Detailed Political Quizzes ) – In a New York Times March 13, 2024, article (“Pro-Israel Lobby Faces Challenges Amid Gaza War and Shifting Politics”), it’s correctly pointed out that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) aggressively helps “fund electoral challenges to left-leaning Democrats it considers insufficiently supportive [of Israel].” However, the article misleads […]

Conspiracy Theories

Could Trump win again? Roots of MAGA Paranoia and the Politics of Fear

Arthur Goldwag

Brooklyn, NY (Special to Informed Comment; featured) – The cover of my The Politics of Fear: The Peculiar Persistence of American Paranoia features a photograph of a bearded, fur-clad man with a horned helmet, tattoos and face paint. On January 6, 2021, Jacob Anthony Chansley, aka the Q Shaman, stood at the House Speakers’ dais […]

Pentagon

Daring Look a Sacred Cow in the Teeth: Military Spending and National (in)Security

William J. Astore

( Tomdispatch.com ) – In an age when American presidents routinely boast of having the world’s finest military, where nearly trillion-dollar war budgets are now a new version of routine, let me bring up one vitally important but seldom mentioned fact: making major cuts to military spending would increase U.S. national security. Why? Because real national […]

Donald Trump

Trump Showed Us Who He Is the First Time: Term 2 Would Be a Thousand Times Worse

Rebecca Gordon

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Recently my partner and I had brunch with some old comrades, folks I first met in the 1996 fight to stop the state of California from outlawing affirmative action. Sadly, we lost that one and, almost three decades later, we continue to lose affirmative action programs thanks to a Supreme Court […]

CIA

US Intelligence: Israel’s Netanyahu not Viable, not Moderate and is Provoking Terrorism

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Annual Threat Assessment of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (Avril Haines) contains some important information that should be highlighted because it refutes right wing propaganda. Let me just draw attention to some of these points. 1. Here’s an essential one: “We assess that Iranian leaders did […]

China

The American Empire in (Ultimate?) Crisis

Alfred W. McCoy

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Empires don’t just fall like toppled trees. Instead, they weaken slowly as a succession of crises drain their strength and confidence until they suddenly begin to disintegrate. So it was with the British, French, and Soviet empires; so it now is with imperial America. Great Britain confronted serious colonial crises in […]

Anti-Zionism

QZionism hits Peak Conspiracy Theory with Smears of Oscar-Winning Jonathan Glazer

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The brave and highly ethical Oscar-award-winning director, Jonathan Glazer, has been targeted by the crazies on the Zionist (Israeli-nationalist) right wing, as were all the actors and film people who expressed horror at the genocide in Gaza. Their allegations on social media are so bizarre and crazed that they are […]

Featured

Biden owes an Apology to the Volunteers of the Mavi Marmara, the First Aid Flotilla to Gaza

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – President Biden owes an apology to fellow American Furkan Doğan, whom Israeli commandos murdered on May 31, 2010, as he videoed their illegal attack in international waters on the aid ship Mavi Marmara. At the time, Biden justified the massacre. Doğan and other volunteers were trying to bring food and […]

Health Care

The Failing Battle for Healthcare in the Dis-United States

Liz Theoharis

( Tomdispatch.com ) – The slang definition of “unwinding” means “to chill.” Other definitions include: to relax, disentangle, undo — all words that, on the surface, appear both passive and peaceful. And yet in Google searches involving such seemingly harmless definitions of decompressing and resting, news articles abound about the end of pandemic-era Medicaid expansion […]