Violence is the most basic and blunt form of press censorship. To kill or imprison a journalist is to silence the public’s source of news. To date, 33 journalists around the world have been killed this year and another 494 are currently imprisoned, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Put another way, thus far in 2022, on average, once per week somewhere in the world a journalist is killed for reporting the news. Continue reading
The television news helicopter shots of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, a suspected major crime scene, reminds one of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s cautionary comment to Luke Skywalker in the first “Star Wars” film: “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” Obi-Wan was referring to the Mos Eisley Spaceport on the planet of Tatooine. The spaceport was a center for various criminals, smugglers, and customs officers on the take. If one could organize a line-up of the members and customers of Mar-a-Lago over the years, it would undoubtedly resemble the nasty-looking clientele of Mos Eisley’s cantina. Continue reading
An official from the U.S. Treasury Department confirmed Friday that, contrary to the unrelenting barrage of lies repeated by GOP operatives for over a week, the Internal Revenue Service is not going to hire 87,000 new agents to harass working people at their homes. Continue reading
In late July, a large sinkhole appeared near the town of Tierra Amarilla in Chile’s Copiapó province in the Atacama salt flat. The crater, which has a diameter of more than 100 feet, emerged in one of Chile’s most lucrative regions for copper and lithium extraction. The nearby Candelaria mining complex—80 percent of the property is owned by Canada’s Lundin Mining Corporation and 20 percent is owned by Japan’s Sumitomo Metal Mining Co Ltd. and Sumitomo Corporation—had to halt its operations in the area. On August 1, Chile’s National Geology and Mining Service (Sernageomin) tweeted that it had assembled a team to investigate the sinkhole that appeared less than 2,000 feet away from human habitation. Continue reading
For years, Palestinians, as well as Israelis, have labored to redraw the battle lines. The three-day Israeli war on Gaza, starting on August 5, clearly manifested this reality. Continue reading
Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), the co-chair of the House Select Committee on the January 6th insurrection, faced constant death threats from supporters of Donald Trump and his hand-picked opponent to Cheney, Harriet Hageman. In a state like Wyoming, where handshaking retail campaigning is a key to electoral success, being forced to host small political events in living rooms proved to be an electoral disaster for Ms. Cheney. Death threats against other Republican and Democratic opponents of Trump have been reported from around the country, a fact that led some Republicans in the House to decide not to seek re-election. Continue reading
Reproductive freedom advocates welcomed a Wednesday decision by the South Carolina Supreme Court temporarily blocking the state’s six-week abortion ban while justices consider a legal challenge to the contested law. Continue reading
Labor Day presents a great opportunity for the Democratic Party to compare their election year story of being on the side of labor, as opposed to the GOP which is invariably backing the wealthy and giant corporations. Continue reading
Another week, another scandal, but the latest—the August 8 FBI “raid” on former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida—looks set for a run of a month or more. Continue reading
Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Lockdowns. Continue reading
A coalition of civil society organizations on Wednesday demanded that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg put a halt to censorship of abortion rights content on his company’s platforms following reports that Facebook and Instagram have been removing posts aimed at helping pregnant people access reproductive care in U.S. states where it is heavily restricted. Continue reading
There’s no place like home. Continue reading
Progressives love the FBI? Leftists embrace the Espionage Act? Of course, one man is responsible for this madness, and he is none other than Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States. The fallout from the FBI search conducted at Trump’s home shows the rank confusion spread by people who call themselves liberal but who are as dangerous as anyone on the right. From the moment that Trump announced the raid they were in full fascist mode, even as they claimed to be fighting fascism. Continue reading
When a golfer hits an errant shot that might bonk an unsuspecting spectator on the head, the proper cry of warning is: “Fore!” But what do they shout when they hit a bad shot that boomerangs and bonks the golfer on the noggin? Continue reading
American voters have heard plenty about Republicans seeking high office in 2022 who still deny that President Joe Biden was legitimately elected. They have heard less about the Democratic candidates running against the election deniers, especially in battleground states. Continue reading
More than two dozen newsrooms and press freedom groups sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday, calling on the Justice Department to prevent journalists and their employers from being prosecuted for simply writing about abortion. Continue reading
Donald Trump, with his affectation for Eastern European models during the Cold War, should have registered with the FBI early on as a potential spy for America’s enemies. Czechoslovak State Security (ŠtB) certainly believed that to be the case when they tripled their efforts to ensure that their two assets, Ivana Zelníčková and her father, Miloš Zelníček, applied a full-court press on Trump beginning in 1976 when Ivana first met Trump. A year later, ŠtB asset Ivana Zelníčková married Trump. The first Mrs. Trump and Warsaw Pact intelligence asset worked her way into top-level executive jobs in the Trump Organization, including president of the Trump Castle Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, later becoming the manager of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. These positions and her marriage to Donald Trump gave Ivana, and the ŠtB and, by default, the Soviet KGB, important access to the movers and shakers of American politics, business, and media. Ivana Trump, the mother of Donald Trump, Jr., Eric, and Ivanka, would continue to have access to her ex-husband and his business and political operations long after their divorce in 1992. These benefits included her use of Mar-a-Lago for one month a year pursuant to her divorce settlement with Donald. Continue reading
As China unleashed live-fire military exercises off the coast of Taiwan, simulating a real “reunification by force” operation in the wake of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s ceremonial visit to the island last week, the bipartisan fervor for a new Cold War with China and Russia took greater hold in Washington. Continue reading
There’s a scene in The Usual Suspects where Kevin Spacey tells the fable of the mysterious Keyser Soze and how he became a crime lord. Continue reading
WASHINGTON—Congressional Republicans haven’t officially unveiled their legislative agenda should they sweep to power in November, but they gave an ugly preview—including putting Social Security payments at risk—this week on the campaign trail and at a key House committee work session. Continue reading
In a new interview with The Wall Street Journal, immortal Hague fugitive Henry Kissinger says the US is acting in a crazy and irrational way that has brought it to the edge of war with Russia and China. Continue reading
The IRS is set to receive its largest funding increase in years thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act. Continue reading
It seemed all but a done deal: Israel is finally managing to bend the Arabs to its will, and Palestine is becoming a marginal issue that no longer defines Israel’s relations with Arab countries. Indeed, normalization with Israel is afoot, and the Arabs, so it seems, have been finally tamed. Continue reading
Ray DeMonia of Cullman, Alabama, was a good and decent man, an antique collector and auctioneer, beloved by friends and family. He and his family were vaccinated, so they didn’t have to worry much about COVID. Continue reading
The recent reporting on the Uber Files—a series of 124,000 communications, dated from 2013 until 2017, that Mark McGann, one of Uber’s top lobbyists, leaked to The Guardian—has shed light on the company’s strategies to gain global prominence during its nascent years. McGann and the many reporters working on the project through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists are commendable for their efforts to bring this history to public attention. Still, the reporting elides a much larger story about the rise of a new model of labor relations being implemented throughout the globe, and workers’ efforts to stop it. Continue reading
Progressive activists and organizers are eyeing lessons from the resounding victory for abortion access in Kansas where nearly 60 percent of voters recently defeated a ban on the politicized medical procedure. Now, the Fairness Project hopes that state-by-state ballot measures can restore the reproductive right to an abortion that the Supreme Court stripped away earlier this year. Such measures can also achieve economic justice victories like increasing the minimum wage and expanding access to paid sick and family leave. Continue reading
National polling results released Wednesday reveal that 70% of U.S. adults across party lines support using ballot measures to determine abortion rights at the state level. Continue reading
There is every indication that the suspected theft of several boxes of highly-classified documents by Donald Trump and his closest aides bears Trump’s personal imprimatur. Had anyone other than the computer-averse Trump wanted to sneakily spirit away such a large amount of paper documents when they would have merely copied them to a small thumb drive and encoded the files with a commercial encryption product. That does not mean that the FBI could not successfully retrieve such documents pursuant to a court order but the presence of some 27 boxes of classified documents in a storage room at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, Florida estate provides an insight into the simple mind of Mr. Trump. And therein lies the possible smoking gun that prosecutors may use to show that Trump stole classified documents for personal gain, including financial arrangements with hostile foreign governments. Continue reading
Norms, in a society or culture, are the accepted ways of behavior we grow up observing and learning in our everyday lives. Norms are rarely backed up by laws, though when norms are grossly violated, calls for legislation may ensue. Continue reading
In an under-the-radar move to boost the GOP’s chances in November, the right-wing Supreme Court has told four states where lower courts found Republican legislators illegally drew congressional boundaries to exclude both Black and Democratic voters that they can go ahead and use those illegal maps in the November election. Continue reading
Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday opened an investigation into the devastating health impacts that state-level GOP abortion bans and restrictions have had on pregnant people across the U.S., citing the litany of horror stories published in local and national newspapers in the weeks since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Continue reading
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Eco-socialism, Democratic communism: common sense
Posted on August 19, 2022 by Frank Scott
More than fifty years after Commoner wrote those words, the environmental problem is almost infinitely worse and what is presently called climate change once thought to affect future generations is engulfing the entire planet right now. While warnings from a scientific community not on corporate payrolls grow more desperate the global political power of capitalism, the primary cause of nature’s breakdown under stress, especially at its fading but still essential center in the USA, is making things worse not just by the hour or minute but every second. Continue reading →