Donald Trump

( Otherwords.org ) – If you’re the sort of person who follows the news, you’ve probably heard a good bit lately about podcaster Joe Rogan, Neil Young’s fight with Spotify, and maybe a little about Russia and Ukraine. All that’s good grist for the mill. But did you also hear former President Trump admit that […]

Donald Trump

Race, Religion and Whoopi Goldberg: Her Mistake on Judaism Pales before that of Trump

H. Scott Prosterman

Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment) – It’s time to stop flogging Whoopi Goldberg, and re-examine the semantics of Judaism as a race or religion. She is NOT anti-Semitic. She said something reckless, but her mistake was not explaining herself well, on a complex topic that most people are ill-informed about to begin with. On […]

Authoritarianism

Beer Hall Putsch 2.0: Republican Nat’l Committee Channels their inner Hitler in defending Capitol Insurrectionists

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Republican National Committee’s censure of Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) slammed the two for “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse” and of “utilizing their past professed political affiliation to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes.” The […]

Donald Trump

America’s Two Pandemics: And How They Mixed and Matched

Tom Engelhardt

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Imagine that you were experiencing all of this (and by this, I mean our lives right now) as if it were a novel, à la Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. The famed author of Robinson Crusoe — Defoe claimed it had been written by the fictional Crusoe himself […]

Donald Trump

How Trump appeased Putin and Endangered Peace in Ukraine

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – I don’t approve of all the loud saber-rattling in Washington on Russia. For reasons I’ll explain below, I nevertheless don’t think Russia has a right to nibble at Ukrainian territory. Although I think Washington over-uses sanctions and in a broad-stroke way that inflicts a lot of harm on innocents, carefully […]

Authoritarianism

Have Sinema and Manchin Tolled the death Knell of Free and Fair Elections for a Decade?

H. Scott Prosterman

Oakland, CA (Special to Informed Comment) – In this Brave New World of evolving lexicons, “gerrymandering,” a dirty word to begin with; has become a euphemism for “vote-rigging.” Lessons learned in high school Civics classes about the electoral and re-districting processes are now quaintly outdated, as Republican-dominated state houses do all they can to ensure […]

Donald Trump

Biden’s First Year vs. Trump’s First Year: Are you Friggin’ Kidding me with this “Failed Presidency” Idiocy?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Republican outlets like Politico and Fox and the Wall Street Journal (the latter two echo chambers for reactionary Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch) have been asking whether Biden’s is a failed presidency. The stupid gives me vertigo. After the lunacy Trump put the country through, even if Biden had had fewer […]

Authoritarianism

Facebook Hosted Surge of Misinformation and Insurrection Threats in Months Leading Up to Jan. 6 Attack, Records Show

ProPublica

By Craig Silverman, ProPublica, Craig Timberg, The Washington Post, Jeff Kao, ProPublica, and Jeremy B. Merrill, The Washington Post | – Co-published with The Washington Post The Insurrection The Effort to Overturn the Election ( ProPublica ) – Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory between Election […]

al-Qaeda

Bin Laden and Trump: Two Bookends to America’s Imperial Decline

Foreign Policy in Focus

By Walden Bello | – The end of 2021 and the beginning of a new year is a convenient time to take stock of the causes of America’s decline. This past year saw both Washington’s inglorious exit from Afghanistan after 20 years in the country that had served as the launching pad for its direct […]