Bill Moyers interviews Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi on why banksters who clearly engaged in illegal activity that crashed the American economy have been held harmless from prosecution. This is the blurb at Bill Moyers’ indispensable site: “Matt Taibbi on Big Banks’ Lack of Accountability February 1, 2013 Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi joins Bill to […]
Arts under the Occupation: Dispatch from Palestine (Quran)
LAYLA QURAN writes at ISLAMiCommentary: Layla Quran (pictured outside Ofer Prison, left) is a sophomore global studies major at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Palestinian-American who moved to the U.S. from Jerusalem when she was four-years-old. She spent 10 weeks in Palestine this past summer researching the impact and role of the […]
Chuck Hagel Mauled in Bizarro World of US Senate
The confirmation hearing in the Senate for Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, was painful to watch because it displayed the tomfoolery, pretense, self-righteous know-nothingism, and embarrassing lack of contact with reality that dominate the landscape of America’s broken democracy. It was like watching a Nebraska ordinary Joe set upon by circus […]
Why the Senate should Confirm Chuck Hagel as SecDef
Reprint edn.: this appeared earlier, but is a propos of today’s Senate confirmation hearings. A future column will treat that process: I doubt Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator from Nebraska, and I would agree about almost anything with regard to domestic US politics . . . But he isn’t being nominated for secretary of […]
Russia slams Israeli bombing of Syria as Violation of UN Charter
The USG Open Source Center translates the statement at the website of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs sharply condemning Israel: Text of “Russian Foreign Ministry statement in connection to reports about air strikes by the Israeli Air Force on targets on Syrian territory” published on the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs website on 31 […]
Is Egypt on the Verge of Civil War? Morsi backs off Emergency Decree
Minister of Defense Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi warned Tuesday that if the country’s turmoil continued, Egypt faced the possibility of a collapse of the state. The intrepid Ben Wedeman of CNN reports on the ambivalence of the Egyptian police about being ordered by a Muslim Brotherhood president to crack down on protesting youth. He thereby […]
Syrian Horror Show, as Obama, Kuwait Pledge Refugee Aid (+ Cole Interview)
The UN donors’ conference in Kuwait made some progress on Wednesday morning toward its goal of $1 billion in aid to the some 700,000 Syrian refugees, many of whom are shivering in tents in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. Kuwait stepped up big time, pledging $300 million. Kuwait has a long tradition of careful and well-executed […]
Egypt: Canal Provinces Defy Morsi, Weakening his Authority
The canal cities of Port Said, Ismailia and Suez rejected the imposition of a curfew and of emergency laws on them Monday night. In the meantime, the major opposition parties declined President Muhammad Morsi’s call for a meeting to work out differences. The National Salvation Front, made up of leftists and old regime secularists, insists […]
Immigration and the Future of America (Chart)
Immigration to the US is if anything accelerating. The 1924-1965 immigration law had been racist and set strict quotas for everyone but northern Europeans. Since 1965, up to 25,000 immigrants can come from each country in the world. Increasingly, immigrants come not from Europe but from Latin America & the Caribbean, from Asia, and from […]
© 2025 All Rights Reserved