Donald Trump

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Jan. 6 Committee revealed on Thursday that Trump knew that the Capitol had been breached by his Oath Keeper and Proud Boy black shirts when he sent his tweet at 2:24 p.m. saying, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our […]

Congress

A Distinctly Native Criminal Class: Was Rep. Loudermilk Part of the Jan. 6 Insurrection? How many in Congress Were?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – There are 435 representatives in the House, and you and I have not heard of most of them. In some instances this anonymity means that they have their noses to the grindstone, quietly representing their districts. In other instances they are involved in shady dealings and shun the spotlight lest […]

Donald Trump

Why the Oath Keepers looks an Awful lot like al-Qaeda and Trump is its Usama Bin Laden

Juan Cole

Revised. Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Although the Congressional inquiry into the Jan. 6 insurrection is releasing new information about the ties between the White House and the insurrectionists, that the attack on the Capitol that day was a well-planned paramilitary operation was clear from Department of Justice indictments already released. Below, I revisit one […]

Conspiracy Theories

What did the President Know and When did He Know it? Trump’s 7-Part Plan and the Insurrection

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – When the news of the burglary at the Democratic campaign headquarters in the Watergate building broke, it wasn’t initially clear that President Tricky Dick Nixon had ordered it. (He did, twice. Yes.) So for those too young to remember that dreary scandal, the question of “What did the president know […]

Civil Rights

The Empire’s New Clothes: The Veneer of Accountability Is Wearing Thin in Twenty-First-Century America

Karen J. Greenberg

( Tomdispatch.com ) – If you watched TV in the 1960s and 1970s as I did, you would undoubtedly have come away with the idea that this country’s courts, law enforcement agencies, and the laws they aimed to honor added up to a system in which justice was always served. In those years, for instance, […]

African-Americans

Under DeSantis, Republican “Child Identity” McCarthyism comes for Mickey Mouse

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Gov. Ron DeSantis’s attack on the Disney Corporation may seem odd, coming from a pro-business governor in a state where Disney is one of the largest employers. But DeSantis is pushing back at Disney on behalf of big capital, in a roundabout way. The entertainment corporations are problematic for the […]

Corruption

Was Jared Kushner the anti-Jon Snow in the Saudi Game of Thrones?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – According to investigative journalist Vicki Ward, Jared Kushner, a minor New York hustler who managed to marry into the Donald Trump crime family, became the anti-Jon Snow in the Saudi game of thrones. That is, he enabled the worst possible ruler to come to power, and got a $2 billion […]

Corruption

Why did the Saudis invest $2 bn with Jared Kushner?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On Sunday, David D. Kirkpatrick and Kate Kelly of the New York Times got a big scoop — they gained access to internal documents of the board that vets investments for the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund, called the Public Investment Fund. These memos demonstrate that the board argued against […]

Donald Trump

Republicans dislike Biden more than Putin by over 2-to-1: No Rallying around the Flag

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A new opinion poll by Shibley Telhami and Stella Rouse at the University of Maryland finds that Republicans dislike President Joe Biden more than Vladimir Putin by a margin of more than 2 to 1. You heard that right. Respondents were asked to name two world leaders they most disliked, […]