Some will recall the emergence of a video during the 2012 election campaign that had been secretly recorded of Mitt Romney speaking to a group of wealthy people, cementing even further his image as a plutocrat who had contempt for the poor. Now a similar audio recording of Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell pandering to billionaires at a closed-door meeting has emerged.
[Read more…]
I like Elizabeth Warren’s policies on the economy and reining in the financial institutions. But when it comes to foreign policy, she turns out to be your run-of-the-mill pro-war Democrat. She voted along with other Democrats in Congress in support of a resolution backing Israel when it was assaulting Gaza but otherwise has avoided making any comment on the issue, running away when asked about it.
[Read more…]
Jon Stewart came back from his vacation and delivered a great rant about Ferguson and the indignities that people of color routinely face in America, comparing it to the kinds of things that the majority constantly whines about. It was excellent.
[Read more…]
Remember during the run up to the Iraq war when the warmongers tried to ratchet up the fear factor and kept hammering at us about how if we did not take immediate action to go to war in other countries, we would end up having to fight those enemies in the streets of US cities? Well, those days are back.
[Read more…]
Kajieme Powell was a mentally disturbed man who was shot dead on the streets of St Louis by police on August 19, 2014, just four miles from the place in Ferguson where Michael Brown had been killed just 10 days earlier. Powell was reportedly carrying a knife and acting erratically and talking to himself and had taken some items from a store without paying for them. Here is what St. Louis police chief’s version of what happened.
[Read more…]
Neoconservative Bill Kristol, whose major accomplishments are pushing for war against Iraq and any other country that happens to not do the bidding of the US and urging John McCain to select Sarah Palin to be his running mate, has exercised his considerable analytical powers to come up with a strategy for dealing with the chaos that his earlier policy recommendations have created in the Middle East.
[Read more…]
Net neutrality is a really important issue that is hard to get people excited about, except for those who are really into internet policy. But John Oliver did an long segment about it that got to the core issue so clearly and understandably that Tim Wu, the Columbia University professor who coined the term ‘net neutrality’, said that it had “rendered every other explanation obsolete.”
[Read more…]
I keep being surprised by Hillary Clinton’s political tone-deafness, given that she has lived such a publicly political life so far. If she really is planning to run for the presidency, her tin ear about saying such things as being ‘dead broke‘ when they left the White House is going to be a real liability.
[Read more…]
Glenn Greenwald writes that developments in Syria and Libya illustrate the same pattern that we saw in Iraq earlier, of how the US destabilizes countries on the blithe assertion that it can once and for all time militarily install a stable regime that will be friendly to it, only to end up creating fertile breeding grounds for violent groups like ISIS/ISIL I Syria and Iraqqand the militant groups dueling for power in Libya.
[Read more…]
The academic Cornel West was one of the first prominent African-American supporters of Barack Obama’s candidacy for president to denounce him for serving as a neoliberal opportunist once he got into office after his election in 2008, and going back on so many of his campaign pledges. In a recent interview with Thomas Frank, he says that Obama posed as a kind of Lincoln but what we got was a “brown-faced Clinton”.
[Read more…]