US politics

The Empire’s New Clothes: The Veneer of Accountability Is Wearing Thin in Twenty-First-Century America

( Tomdispatch.com ) – If you watched TV in the 1960s and 1970s as I did, you would undoubtedly have come away with the idea that this country’s courts, law enforcement agencies, and the laws they aimed to honor added up to a system in which justice was always served. In those years, for instance, […]

American Jews

Majority of Americans of all Religions or None want Legal Abortion, except for Evangelicals and 47% of Catholics

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Pew Research Center has a poll out on views about abortion of American religious groups. It shows that in most American religious groups, as well as religious “nones” (people without strong religious beliefs, including agnostics and atheists), the majority believes that abortion should be legal in “all or most […]

Feminism

SCOTUS Dispensing with Roe v. Wade Is Attack on Religious Freedom and Jewish Law

H. Scott Prosterman

Oakland (Special to Informed Comment) – The leaked SCOTUS draft to overturn Roe v. Wade leaves a lot to unpack. For Jews, Muslims and other religious minorities, this is a threat to religious liberty in general. Jewish law, (Halacha), does not consider the fetus to be a being with a soul until it is born, […]

Featured

Jared Kushner to invest Saudi Funds in Israeli Tech: Is MBS sidestepping his father King Salman on Palestine?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Dion Nissenbaum and Rory Jones at the Wall Street Journal got the scoop that Affinity, Jared Kushner’s investment firm, will invest some of the $2 billion it got from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund in Israel. Kushner told the WSJ that he sees building investment and business ties between the […]

National Security State

The Last Good Guys? Five Reasons Why Washington Can’t Break Its War Addiction

William J. Astore

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Why has the United States already become so heavily invested in the Russia-Ukraine war? And why has it so regularly gotten involved, in some fashion, in so many other wars on this planet since it invaded Afghanistan in 2001? Those with long memories might echo the conclusion reached more than a […]

Climate Crisis

What Remains of the U.S. Green New Deal?

John Feffer

By John Feffer | – In November 2018, the Green New Deal became a rallying cry for climate activists when members of the Sunrise Movement occupied House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and adopted the slogan as their unifying message. A few months later, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who had joined the young activists in Pelosi’s […]

Feminism

Nothing Is More Personal Than the Right to Control Your Own Body

Olivia Alperstein

( Otherwords.org ) – The personal, as they say, is political. And there’s nothing more personal than the right to control your own body. So as a human with reproductive organs, the leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion overruling Roe v. Wade — and the constitutional right to abortion — is obviously personal to […]

History

Draft Overturning Roe v. Wade Quotes Infamous Witch Trial Judge With Long-Discredited Ideas on Rape

ProPublica

By Ken Armstrong ( ProPublica ) – When U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, in a draft opinion obtained and published this week by Politico, detailed his justifications for overturning Roe v. Wade, he invoked a surprising name given the case’s subject. In writing about abortion, a matter inextricably tied to a woman’s control over […]

Featured

Occupied Bodies: How SCOTUS’ repeal of Roe and the Israeli Supreme Court’s Expulsion of Palestinians are Similar

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – This week a leaked opinion by far right wing Justice Samuel Alito revealed that the Trump-Bush majority on the Supreme Court intended to reverse Roe v. Wade and allow states to make abortion illegal. Throughout Alito’s opinion ran a subtext, however, of denying the constitutional right to privacy, a notion […]