Some date the advent of the tea party to 2007, when then-presidential candidate Ron Paul held a “tax day tea party” fundraiser to fill his campaign coffers. But the broader movement began five years ago last week — shortly after Barack Obama was…
Rachel Maddow: CIA spying on Congress ‘is death of the Republic stuff’
A dispute between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Senate Intelligence Committee may have spilled into dangerous territory, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said on Wednesday, following a New York Times report that agency operatives gained access…
Ukraine Crisis Shows Urgency of Green Energy: Russian Nat’l Gas Blackmail
(By Juan Cole) Hawks are complaining that Europe has been insufficiently belligerent in its response to Russian moves in the Crimea, blaming the declining military budgets in most European countries. But this focus on military hardware is misleading, since there was never any prospect of a conventional military confrontation with the Russian Federation, given that […]
McCain’s Mind-Boggling Hypocrisy on Crimea at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Conference
John Hickman, author of Selling Guantanamo, writes in a guest column for Informed Comment That the Crimean Crisis would be exploited by Republican Congressional leaders to criticize President Obama was inevitable. Politics hasn’t stopped at the water’s edge in the United States for a very long time. What wasn’t inevitable was the shamelessness of Senator […]
Obama to Netanyahu: Israel faces Int’l Sanctions over “Permanent Occupation of West Bank”
(By Juan Cole) Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, D.C., this week was even more of a disaster for him than might have been expected. It did not help that the Crimea crisis had broken out, which rather cast a bad light on one country militarily occupying parts of another. Most observers in Europe […]
Fracking Ban Momentum Builds On Both Sides Of The Atlantic
Local communities that are pushing for a ban on fracking will get a helping hand from the British green energy company Ecotricity, which is launching a new short film this Thursday to boost public awareness about negative impacts of the unconventional…
What today’s GOP gets Wrong about Leadership: Obama & Eisenhower, Russian & Israeli Recklessness
(By Juan Cole) The usual suspects have been slamming President Obama for an alleged lack of leadership. Trolls for the military-industrial complex like Charles Krauthammer, and megalomaniacs from tiny states like Sen. Lindsey Graham have constructed a narrative in which Obama willfully withdrew from Iraq, giving it away to Iran; has been insufficiently slavish in […]
Massive Protest by Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox against Conscription
Israel’s Haredim, an Eastern European branch of Judaism emphasizing strict religious adherence, were a tiny minority at Israel’s founding in 1948 and were given an exemption from conscription. Many Haredim rejected Zionism or modern Jewish nationalism and did not accept that a Jewish state could be established save by the Messiah. Now the Haredim have […]
The Crimean Crisis and the Middle East: Will Syria & Iran be the Winners?
(By Juan Cole) The Russian intervention in the Crimea is more direct and dramatic than the one in Syria, with actual troops deployed. But there are similarities. One of the little-noted rationales for Russian support for the Baath government in Damascus is that it is seen as more favorable, being secular and minority-dominated, toward Syria’s […]
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