Sucker Punch: Screwing the Rubes in Bipartisan Comity
As the Trumps Dodged Taxes, Their Tenants Paid a Price (NYT) A cheap, greedy crook damaging the lives of ordinary people: that’s what Trump always was, that’s what he is today — albeit on a monstrously larger scale. Of course, his MAGA mooks will just pull their red caps (made in China) down a little further […]
Бесы: The Oily Eaters of the Planet
The Oil Industry’s Covert Campaign to Rewrite American Car Emissions Rules (NYT) It doesn’t matter if the planet burns and our children choke to death on dirty air. The only thing that matters is that the Koch Brothers and their cronies make a bit more money to add to their already-monstrous piles of wealth (much […]
Criminal History: BCCI, the Bushes … and Mueller
As the newly dead George Herbert Walker Bush luxuriates in the accolades of America’s bipartisan political/media establishment, I thought it meet to look again at the article below, which I wrote in 2006, detailing one of the great glories of his great and glorious reign: the thwarting of the investigation into BCCI, “one of the […]
A Quick Pre-Election Peek into the Palantír
Here are my last-minute predictions for Election 2018. Rather gloomy ones, I’m afraid — but as with almost everything else I’ve written about politics in this century, I hope I’m badly, embarrassingly wrong. Anyway, here goes. The Republicans will hold the Senate, as most people expect. They will hold the House as well, although with […]
Toxic Tropes: “Skyrocketing” Racism Through Respectable Journalism
Exclusive: Trump to terminate birthright citizenship (Axios.com) Even in a straightforward news story, which gives valuable information about the latest planned Trump outrage on immigration, we can see how the “objective” language is weighted toward inflammatory interpretation. The story notes: Between 1980 and 2006, the number of births to unauthorized immigrants — which opponents of birthright citizenship call […]
The American Mirror: Darkness Visible
Quinlan: Come on, read my future for me. Tana: You haven’t got any. Quinlan: Hmm? What do you mean? Tana: Your future’s all used up. A grotesquely bloated, corrupt cop stumbling through a self-created mire of lies and death, sick of the world and his own ugly, irredeemable self. Glints and flecks of a better […]
Dial “N” for Mayhem: Wording Our Way to a New Level of Hell
This piece appeared first on CounterPunch earlier this week. It’s odd. A few months ago, I made a prediction that Donald Trump would bring the “n-word” back into public use by the end of this year, or next year at the latest. At the time, I thought it would play out like this: some right-wing […]
Sword Play: Centrists and Right Unite to Support Saudi Extremists
Female Activist in Saudi Arabia Faces Death Penalty A nation led by violent extremists is moving to behead a woman for taking part in peaceful demonstrations for human rights. It’s not Iran, not North Korea, not Syria, not Russia. It’s Saudi Arabia, the firm and friendly ally of the US & UK. The same nation […]
Yemen: The Damning Silence of Liberals Leaves a Legacy of Shame
Hudaydah ‘one airstrike away from unstoppable epidemic’: UN humanitarian chief in Yemen. (UN News) In the US and UK, the war in Yemen is only ever mentioned (and that rarely) as a “humanitarian crisis”: “Oh, those poor people starving and suffering and dying from epidemics. Hey, what did Trump tweet? What’s Mueller up to?” There is […]
Echoes Past and Future: Helsinki Goon Show Masks the Real Rot That Bedevils Us
“There’s the cue: an echo from the future…” Boris Pasternak, “Hamlet,” from Doctor Zhivago I. It’s true Trump behaved like a chump and a lackey with Putin during their press conference on Monday. But if Don really has done a deal with Vlad — as opposed to, say, simply acting out his deeply disturbed need […]