O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? – Matthew 12:34 I. People need to understand something about Afghanistan, and the debacle we’re witnessing there. America’s involvement in Afghanistan didn’t begin in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks. It began in the last years of the Carter Administration, when he and his advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski set out to “give the Soviets their own Vietnam.” They did this by funding and arming an international cohort of violent fundamentalist extremists and training them in terror tactics. (Osama bin Laden was one of those who joined this jihad army supported

BERLIN, May 12, 2153 – Within the ivy-covered walls of Farben University, a great battle is now raging. But although the Reich’s ancient capital has seen its share of warfare down through the centuries, today’s combatants have no swords, no guns, no bio-disrupters – just words and pictures, marshalled on either side of a fierce debate that has split the staid academic world in two, and is beginning to spill over into national politics as well. It all revolves around a simple question: Was the German Empire a good thing or a bad thing? At one time, the answer would have

A friend of mine wrote on Facebook after the acquittal tonight: “America is truly lost.” And his words prompted this response from me: “Yes, you are sadly right. America is lost. But it was lost when it killed 3 million people in Southeast Asia when I was a boy. It was lost when Nixon obliterated Cambodia with an illegal bombing campaign and paved the way for the Khmer Rouge to kill millions more. It was lost when Ronald Reagan cracked jokes about “queers” and did nothing while tens of thousands died of AIDS, and when he armed genocidal dictators in

I really don’t want to hear anyone saying that the staggering cave-in by the Democrats on Saturday – their monumental act of political and moral cowardice – was because they wanted to “move on and get down to the business of passing Covid relief and confirming cabinet posts, etc.” If that’s your defense of these weak reeds, please bear this mind: Congress is going into RECESS next week. They aren’t going to doing ANYTHING about Covid relief next week. (Just as they’ve not done anything about it for the 42 days of full Democratic control of Congress — oh, except

It is with great sadness that I must announce the death of the publisher and co-founder of Empire Burlesque, Richard Kastelein. Rich passed away last Friday at the age of 53. I saw the news this morning in a brief on-line notice from his family. If there is any information forthcoming about memorials and remembrances, I will pass it on. Rich was one of few people who could with real justice be described as a force of nature: a man of immense talent, ranging over many fields, with a passion for life at every level that inspired and invigorated all who knew

The Democratic leadership has announced that the House will not be called into session again until after the inauguration. So that’s it: no impeachment, no censure, no investigations, nothing. They are going to do absolutely nothing about an armed invasion of Congress aimed at overthrowing a presidential election. They are going to do nothing about it, not even make a *gesture* of doing something about it. What does that say to the many fascists seething not only in the populace but also in the halls of power? It says: Do your worst; there are no consequences. This is a monstrous

The Trumpists will keep on pushing their (thus-far) cack-handed coup attempt because they know two things: 1) it might just succeed, in which case, yay! and 2) None of them will suffer any consequences for their blatant attempt to degrade and destroy the democratic process. If the coup fails, Mike Pompeo will be sitting on corporate boards in late January; Bill Barr will be raking in cash at  some bigtime law firm; the ROWS (Right-Wing Oligarch Welfare Spigot) will keep spewing moolah and concocting fake jobs for the likes of Snivelling Stevie Miller, Kayleigh McEnany, Mick Mulvaney, etc.; Mike Pence will

If you are resting easy about the election result: don’t. If you don’t think Trump, McConnell and their party of rightwing extremists, who have already exerted every sinew in a bid to destroy the democratic process, won’t keep on doing this until the very last second, with every weapon at their disposal, no matter what damage it will cause — think again. This is the endgame: to use monstrous, baseless deceit, heavy political pressure, bribery, blackmail, chaos, cajolery and fear to force enough GOP-led states to shut down or delay the Electoral College process past its deadline.  Then the election

You’d think that if you woke up after an election to find one candidate leading by two million votes, with the millions of votes yet to be counted almost certainly going heavily in his favor, that would be it: “Well, the result seems clear: you had a race and the voters chose one guy over another. That’s democracy in action!” But we are dealing with the United States and its Electoral College: the 18th-century contraption of slave-owning elites who had already restricted the right to a vote to limited categories of white men. Yet even with this truncated electorate, they