I hate to say it but it looks like war with Syria is now inevitable.
Philip Weiss reports that the Israel lobby, which was keeping a low profile on its views about Syria, has come out into the open with a full-throated lobbying effort in Congress to authorize a war with Syria. Obama’s statement that he seeks a broader goal than merely ‘punishing’ Syria and that he seeks to destabilize the government must have helped in its decision. [Read more…]
I have been hard on NPR for sometimes seeming like a propaganda outlet for the Pentagon but I have to credit Scott Simon and the Weekend Edition Saturday team for airing an interview with a Syrian that ran counter to the usual narrative. The interviewee was Nada Keuttnen, someone who acts a ‘fixer’ for NPR and other western journalists in Damascus to help them navigate the area and meet people. This is just one person’s view, of course, but it was a change from what we normally hear in the western media. [Read more…]
The issue of whether the words ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance made it unconstitutional to say at state-sponsored events seemed to have been settled in 2010 when several US Courts of Appeals ruled that since no federal law required people to recite the pledge, no violation of the US constitution occurred. Since there was no divergence in the various appeals court rulings, it was unlikely to be heard by the US Supreme Court and the issue seemed no longer contestable. [Read more…]
It became increasingly clear during the last election that the Republican party strategy in several states was to try and suppress the minority vote by adopting various local rules that made it harder to register and vote and also removing minority voters from the rolls on dubious grounds, fearing that that vote would go overwhelmingly for the Democratic party. That strategy failed to sway the eventual outcome (at least at the presidential level) but now with the US Supreme Court striking down the provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required certain parts of the country to get pre-clearance from the US Justice Department before changing voting rules, some elements of the party seem to think that this gives them much greater freedom to adopt measures that can suppress the minority vote more effectively. [Read more…]
Jesus and Mo disagree as to whether it can be done.
After linking to the video of Dustin Hoffmann talking about the creation of the film Tootsie where he describes having an epiphany about how women are treated while researching the film, I decided to watch it again. [Read more…]
Max Blumenthal writes that John Kerry now uses rhetoric that combines all the warlike imagery of the past.
In a Labor Day conference call with 127 House Democrats, Secretary of State John Kerry invoked an apocalyptic scenario, summoning visions of American power and credibility incinerated in a terrible Middle East-wide conflagration laced with nerve gas and enriched uranium. [Read more…]
I do not directly invest in the stock market. I do not have the knowledge to do so nor sufficient interest to invest the time to study how it works to make the kinds of informed decisions that are required. Of course, my retirement money is invested by others on my behalf but that goes on automatically without any involvement on my part. I have no idea what is going on. [Read more…]
Thanks to a link provided by commenter Marcus Ranum, I want to bring to readers’ attention this gripping account by Adam Curtis of the of the twists and turns of post-World War II Syrian history, and how it interweaves with the histories of Iraq and Egypt. I am reposting it here because it deserves a much wider readership. [Read more…]
As the congressional debate on whether to authorize military action against Syria gets under way, we will hear endlessly from the war hawks who have predictably started salivating at the prospect of more killing by the US military about the need to uphold US ‘credibility’ and that in the highly unlikely event that Congress votes down the resolution and the administration abides by their decision, US credibility will be seriously damaged. As numerous commentators and commenters to this blog have pointed out, ‘credibility’ has now become narrowly identified with the willingness of the US to carry out a threat, whether or not that threat was wise or even reasonable. [Read more…]