US politics

( Inequality.org) – America’s national media typically pay little attention to the moves the nation’s state lawmakers make. Not this year. State legislative battles have emerged over recent months as a top-tier national story. And deservedly so. The battling at the state level — on a tidal wave of proposed new voter-suppression laws — could […]

Pentagon

Did our Lost Imperial Wars turn America into our present Trumpian Dystopia?

Andrew J. Bacevich

( Tomdispatch.com) – In the long and storied history of the United States Army, many young officers have served in many war zones. Few, I suspect, were as sublimely ignorant as I was in the summer of 1970 upon my arrival at Cam Ranh Bay in the Republic of Vietnam. Granted, during the years of […]

Donald Trump

Biden’s First Year vs. Trump’s First Year: Are you Friggin’ Kidding me with this “Failed Presidency” Idiocy?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Republican outlets like Politico and Fox and the Wall Street Journal (the latter two echo chambers for reactionary Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch) have been asking whether Biden’s is a failed presidency. The stupid gives me vertigo. After the lunacy Trump put the country through, even if Biden had had fewer […]

Joe Biden

After a Year of Biden, Why Do We Still Have Trump’s Foreign Policy?

Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies

( Code Pink) – President Biden and the Democrats were highly critical of President Trump’s foreign policy, so it was reasonable to expect that Biden would quickly remedy its worst impacts. As a senior member of the Obama administration, Biden surely needed no schooling on Obama’s diplomatic agreements with Cuba and Iran, both of which […]

Pentagon

Guantánamo’s Forever Elusive Endgame: Will We “Celebrate” Its 30th Anniversary?

Karen J. Greenberg

( Tomdispatch.com ) – It’s now more than 20 years later and that American offshore symbol of mistreatment and injustice, the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is still open. In fact, as 2021 ended, New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg, who has covered that notorious prison complex since its first day, reported on the Pentagon’s […]

Bill of Rights

Gitmo’s Shameful Twentieth Anniversary

Foreign Policy in Focus

By Farrah Hassen | – ( Foreign Policy in Focus) – The U.S. prison at the Guantánamo Bay naval base reached its shameful 20th anniversary of operations on January 11 — with a legacy marked by the detention of nearly 800 Muslim men and boys, the majority of them held without charge or trial for […]

nuclear weapons

Only Fools Replay Doomsday: The Cold War, Reborn and Resurgent

William J. Astore

( Tomdispatch.com ) – In the early 1960s, at the height of America’s original Cold War with the Soviet Union, my old service branch, the Air Force, sought to build 10,000 land-based nuclear missiles. These were intended to augment the hundreds of nuclear bombers it already had, like the B-52s featured so memorably in the […]

Authoritarianism

Facebook Hosted Surge of Misinformation and Insurrection Threats in Months Leading Up to Jan. 6 Attack, Records Show

ProPublica

By Craig Silverman, ProPublica, Craig Timberg, The Washington Post, Jeff Kao, ProPublica, and Jeremy B. Merrill, The Washington Post | – Co-published with The Washington Post The Insurrection The Effort to Overturn the Election ( ProPublica ) – Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory between Election […]

African-Americans

Black Americans mostly left behind by Progress since Dr. King’s Death

The Conversation

By Sharon Austin | – On Apr. 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, while assisting striking sanitation workers. Back then, over a half century ago, the wholesale racial integration required by the 1964 Civil Rights Act was just beginning to chip away at discrimination in education, jobs and public […]