Featured

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Monday that the Trump administration would slash refugee admissions to 30,000 in 2019, down from 45,000 in 2018 and from 85,000 in fiscal 2016. Refugees come in numbers to the US when there is a crisis in their own country. At the same time, US policies toward refugees in […]

Featured

Kavanaugh: Dr. Christine Blasey seeks to Forestall a Trauma to the Nation that was Inflicted on Her

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Christine Blasey Ford, a professor of Psychiatry at Palo Alto University and an affiliate at Stanford University, gave a harrowing interview in the Washington Post Sunday accusing a young, drunk Brett Kavanaugh of having attempted to rape her. He tore, she alleges, at the bathing suit she was wearing under […]

Featured

Top 7 Signs Willie Nelson Might not be a Republican (That’s ‘TeaPot Party,’ not Tea Party)

Juan Cole

“Christians everywhere should be up in arms,” Nelson said about Trump border family separation policy

Donald Trump

Manafort’s Plea Deal is a Constitutional Crisis, we Just don’t Know it Yet

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trump’s campaign manager April-August of 2016, Paul Manafort has agreed to plead guilty to conspiring against the United States. In return for a reduction of his sentence he must answer fully and candidly all the questions asked him by special counsel Robert Mueller and his team about criminal wrongdoing. Since […]

Democratic Party

How the Corporate Media Treated Julia Salazar differently from Trump and Netanyahu

Juan Cole

Julia Salazar, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has won the Democratic primary for state senator from Brooklyn and neighboring areas in New York, defeating a long-serving incumbent she claimed was in the back pocket of the realtors. Coverage of her campaign, however, read like a salacious tabloid, and had a weird set […]

Extreme Weather

Dear Carolinas: You can’t Outlaw Storm Surges & Climate Crisis; Physics isn’t Interested in Your Laws

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – There has been a flurry of irony-heavy articles about how the North Carolina, Republican-dominated state legislature, in 2012 forbade state-employed scientists from talking about sea level rise and climate crisis. This ostrich policy of just denying reality was intended to prevent real estate values along the coast from falling, and […]

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Top 3 Charges on which John Bolton should be Tried at Int’l Criminal Court

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – National Security Adviser John Bolton appears to be spiraling down into the same miasma of madness that possesses other members of the Trump administration– perhaps caused by a microbe carried in Trump’s sniffle. This week he threatened justices of the International Criminal Court in the Hague with physical abduction were […]

Featured

Did Trump almost start WW III with Russia with Proposed Massive Bombing of Syrian AF?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – According to Bob Woodward’s just-released book, “Fear,” Donald Trump had been pressed to use 200 cruise missiles to destroy the Syrian Air Force in 2017. Knowing that the Russian Aerospace Forces personnel were all over Syrian air bases, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis became alarmed, and shaped a limited response […]

Donald Trump

#Plaidshirtguy shows Why Trump likes Mideast Dictators

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The most striking characteristic of the tyrant is pettiness. Trump as president is dangerous. He is volatile. He shouts that he wants people killed, and apparently in large numbers sometimes (“kill them all,” he appears to have said about the Syrian government, and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis just ignored […]