National Security State

Think Progress | – “Scott Walker speaks at CPAC 2015” Think Progress Video: “Scott Walker compares unions to ISIS”

American ‘Exceptionalism’ or just Above the Law? Torture, Drones, Assassination with Impunity

By Alfred W. McCoy | (Tomdispatch.com) – “The sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” said conservative thinker Carl Schmitt in 1922, meaning that a nation’s leader can defy the law to serve the greater good. Though Schmitt’s service as Nazi Germany’s chief jurist and his unwavering support for Hitler from the night of […]

Barack Obama

War on Whistleblowers (ft. Edward Snowden & David Carr)

contributors

Brave New Films | – Brave New Films: War on Whistleblowers (ft. Edward Snowden & David Carr) War on Whistleblowers highlights recent cases where American government employees and contractors took to the media to expose fraud and abuse. In all cases the whistle-blowing was to the detriment of their professional and personal lives. With President […]

Domestic Surveillance

‘I would have come forward sooner’ – Snowden on NSA leak regrets

contributors

RT | – Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has frequently said that he does not regret blowing the whistle on the agency’s mass surveillance programs. However, he has now stated that he would change one thing if he could do it all again. He would have leaked the information earlier. Snowden made the […]

African-Americans

In New Gilded Age, Social Protest dominates Academy Awards Ceremony

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – If social and economic inequality were a mine, and if America were deep in this mine with a canary in tow, the canary would long since have expired. Some 400 billionaires have more wealth than the bottom half of Americans. We lived through a year of dramatic incidents […]

African-Americans

Giuliani & Obama: Immigrant Families and Really Loving America

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – Rudy Giuliani maintains that Barack Obama doesn’t love the United States of America because of the way he was brought up. Obama was largely brought up after age 10 by his grandmother and grandfather on his mother’s side, Madelynn Dunham and Stanley Armour Dunham. Stanley Dunham enlisted in […]

film

War Porn: Hollywood and War from World War II to “American Sniper”

contributors

By Peter Van Buren | (Tomdispatch.com) – In the age of the all-volunteer military and an endless stream of war zone losses and ties, it can be hard to keep Homeland enthusiasm up for perpetual war. After all, you don’t get a 9/11 every year to refresh those images of the barbarians at the airport […]

Bush

Jeb Bush on Foreign Policy: Peddling old Iraq Myths Again

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – Jeb Bush gave a maiden foreign police speech in Chicago yesterday in which he mixed up Iran with Iraq and alleged with science fictional inaccuracy that Daesh (ISIS or ISIL) has 200,000 men under arms. The actual number of fighters is probably 20,000. His office later admitted that […]

Corporate Surveillance

Not your Founding Fathers’ America: Permanent War, Permanent Election Campaigns, Guns, Drones and Surveillance

Tom Engelhardt

By Tom Engelhardt | (Tomdispatch.com) I never fail to be amazed — and that’s undoubtedly my failing. I mean, if you retain a capacity for wonder you can still be awed by a sunset, but should you really be shocked that the sun is once again sinking in the west? Maybe not. The occasion for […]