It is a recent tradition among occupants of the White House, as they head out of office, to play a few practical jokes on their successors. The Clinton administration jesters, for instance, removed all the Ws from White House keyboards before handing over the keys to George W. Bush’s transition team. The Obama administration left behind books authored by Barack Obama for Trump’s incoming press team. Continue reading
In 2016, Alan Lichtman departed from conventional wisdom to predict a Donald Trump victory in that year’s presidential election. The political scientist was following something he called the “13 keys to the White House.” Using this relatively straightforward metric, Lichtman had correctly predicted the outcome of presidential elections stretching back to 1984. Continue reading
Federal agents poured into Portland, Oregon, this month to crack down on anti-racism protests. They beat up peaceful protesters and fired impact munitions at demonstrators, seriously injuring one of them. They drove around the city in unmarked vans pulling people off the street. Continue reading
You pay little attention to the systems of your body—circulatory, digestive, pulmonary—unless something goes wrong. Continue reading
The far right thrives on fear. It’s no surprise, then, that it would use the latest pandemic, which has generated widespread panic, to bolster its own agenda. Continue reading
A crisis, according to self-help and leadership books, reveals much about a person’s character. The same can be said of a nation’s character. Continue reading
Donald Trump filed his paperwork to run for reelection only hours after his inauguration in January 2017, setting a presidential record, the first of his many dubious achievements. For a man who relished the adulation and bombast of campaigning, it should have surprised no one that he charged out of the starting gate so quickly for 2020 as well. After all, he’d already spent much of the December before his inauguration on a ”thank you” tour of the swing states that had unexpectedly supported him on Election Day—Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—and visited Florida for a rally only a couple of weeks after he took the oath of office. In much the same way that Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky once embraced “permanent revolution,” Donald Trump embarked on a “permanent campaign.” Continue reading
At a dinner party in mid-February, an architect told me that he was having a problem finishing his building projects. It was the carpets. Continue reading
The epicenter of China’s coronavirus outbreak is widely thought to be a wet market in Wuhan. At such markets, seafood, chicken, and other conventional foodstuffs are on sale alongside live animals. You can buy more than just dogs and cats there. Local epicures also shop for more exotic fare like foxes, badgers, civets, and snakes. Continue reading
With a stroke of a pen, Donald Trump created an entirely new branch of the armed forces last year. It’s the first new branch of the U.S. military since 1947. Continue reading
The United States has been in a 40-year cold war with Iran. Continue reading
A succession of social upheavals over the last decade has radically realigned political power throughout the world. Continue reading
The far right is on a roll. Just a few years ago, liberals and conservatives would have considered its recent political victories a nightmare scenario. Right-wing extremists have won elections in the United States, Brazil, Hungary, India, and Poland. They pushed through the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom. In the most recent European Parliament elections, far-right parties captured the most votes in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Hungary. Continue reading
Trump’s public appeal to China last week to help with uncovering dirt on the Biden family was both a brazen flouting of the law and (it pains me to say) an astute political tactic. Continue reading
A month after he won the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump gave a speech in North Carolina where he declared that “we will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with.” Continue reading
John Bolton tried his best. Continue reading
Doesn’t idiocy ever take a vacation? Continue reading
The United States witnessed three mass shootings in one week recently in California, Texas, and Ohio. There have been more than 250 mass shootings so far in 2019, more than one a day. This year in America, more than 33,000 shooting incidents have killed more than 8,700 people. Continue reading
RSS
Too many Americans belong to the cult of selfish individualism. In the COVID era, this has become a death cult.
Posted on August 5, 2020 by John Feffer
On a per capita basis, Belgium has been the European country hardest hit by the coronavirus. With a population of 11.5 million, it registered over 66,000 infections and nearly 10,000 deaths. In fact, Belgium’s level of mortality of 860 deaths per million inhabitants is the highest in the world. Continue reading →