Wishing you a joyous holiday season!
Monday
By Neal Gabler
If you have any doubts that the phenomenon of Donald Trump was a long time a’coming, you have only to read a piece that Gore Vidal wrote for Esquire magazine in July 1961, when the conservative movement was just beginning and even Barry Goldwater was hardly a glint in Republicans’ eyes.
By Ben Tanosborn
For some of us who had an upbringing in traditional, conservative homes, and who first registered to vote as members of the Republican Party, conservatism is a sad memory of old: arcane economic-sociopolitical liturgy, just like that of the Latin Mass.
By Ramzy Baroud
Now that the American mask has completely fallen, Palestinians require an urgent rethink in their own political priorities, alliances and national liberation strategy.
By Robert Reich
Here are the 3 main Republican arguments in favor of the Republican tax plan, followed by the truth.
By Missy Comley Beattie
To say we’re approaching the brink is a yawner. Especially when Nobel Prize recipients are warning that we’re poised at a tantrum. They’ve called on Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un to “tone down the rhetoric” to prevent nuclear disaster, that we’re a “tantrum away” from catastrophe. Isn’t it enough we have an epic urgency—that Mother Earth is marinating in pollutants, one of which is pesticides that are neurotoxic and carcinogenic? Big Pharma to the rescue though with an answer that’s unrelated to prevention: drugs, drugs whose side effects often are as bad or worse than the diseases they’re designed to treat. We’re at a death-rattle moment in human history. See this link for the world’s worst air quality locations.
Tuesday
By Robert Reich
“The American people have waited 31 long years to see our broken tax code overhauled,” the leaders of the Koch’s political network insisted in a letter to members of Congress recently, urging swift approval of the Republican tax plan.
By Stephen Lendman
Has it only just started? Has a third Intifada begun? It’s too soon to know. Hindsight alone will tell.
By Philip M. Giraldi
Secret police are characteristic of dictatorships, or so goes the conventional thinking on the subject. Police in democracies operate for the most part transparently and within a set of rules and guidelines that limits their ability to gratuitously punish citizens who have done nothing wrong. If a policeman operating under rule-of-law steps out of line, he can be held accountable. That is also conventional thinking.
‘Trump's utter lack of morality, ethics and simple humanity has been underscored during his 11 months in office,’ editorial states.
By Andrea Germanos
USA Today, the most widely-circulated newspaper in the U.S, has penned a scathing takedown of President Donald Trump, calling him “uniquely awful,” unfit to clean the toilets in his predecessor’s presidential library, and a person “who can always find room for a new low.”
By Neal Gabler
Historians may determine that Nov. 8, 2016, was the date America’s second civil war began. By that perspective, just as the first Civil War was the last gasp of slavery, this second is very likely the last gasp of aging white Americans—their full-throated death rattle against an America that they detest for having changed so dramatically the traditions and power structures by which those whites had lived. Regressions are often like that. They are an angry attempt to prevent a threatening future from arriving. Republicans had long preyed upon these discontents, but did so tepidly—a wink-and-nod approach. Trump voiced them and validated them, making racism, nativism and sexism acceptable. It will be his primary legacy.
Wednesday
By Paul Craig Roberts
What do we make of Trump’s national security speech? First of all, it is the military/security complex’s speech, and it is inconsistent with Trump’s intention of normalizing relations with Russia.
By Michael Winship
In 1814, First Lady Dolley Madison helped hide the White House’s famous portrait of George Washington from the British when they burned and sacked the capital. But if the current pack of brigands raiding DC has its way, by the time they’re done, that painting and every other piece of government property that isn’t nailed down will be stolen and put up for sale on eBay.
By Stephen Lendman
Though not a dictator like Hitler, neocons running Donald Trump’s geopolitical agenda are ruthless.
By Linda S. Heard
Donald Trump’s flouting of international law with his recognition that [occupied] Jerusalem is Israel’s capital elicited worldwide condemnation, not least from predominately Muslim states. Protestors have taken to the streets throughout the Middle East, Asia and Europe to vent their frustrations burning effigies of the US president. To date there is no nation on earth willing to follow the Trump administration’s lead.
By Martha Rosenberg
“Prince was not addicted to pain medication. Prince had a medical condition—chronic pain–which is criminally under-treated. . . . Physical dependence is not addiction.” So reads one of many articles that defend opioids and blame their restrictions for the nation’s opioid crisis. Right.
Thursday
By Wayne Madsen
With mounting evidence that the US conducted germ warfare operations against North Korea during the Korean conflict, a US apology to the North Korean people could go a long way toward bringing Washington and Pyongyang into a dialogue over North Korea’s nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missile programs. During the Korean War, there were substantive charges from the international community that the United States used chemical and biological weapons (CBW) on the Korean peninsula.
The Senate majority leader loves giving tax cuts to the rich, but not as much as he loves stacking the courts with right-wing extremists
By Jake Johnson
Even while riding the high of his party’s dead-of-night tax victory, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) still wouldn’t call the GOP’s $1.5 trillion “gift to the rich” the crowning achievement of his career. That honor, McConnell told Bloomberg in an interview, remains with “Neil Gorsuch and the changes we’re making in the circuit courts.”
By Eric Zuesse
Due to a historic data-dump on December 10, the biggest swindle that occurred in the 20th Century (or perhaps ever) is now proven as a historical fact; and this swindle was done by the US government, against the government and people of Russia, and it continues today and keeps getting worse under every US president. It was secretly started by US President George Herbert Walker Bush on the night of 24 February 1990; and, unless it becomes publicly recognized and repudiated so that it can stop, a nuclear war between the US and all of NATO on one side, versus Russia on the other, is inevitable unless Russia capitulates before then, which would be vastly less likely than such a world-ending nuclear war now is.
By Francis Boyle
Historically this latest eruption of American militarism at the start of the 21st Century is akin to that of America opening the 20th Century by means of the U.S.-instigated Spanish-American War in 1898. Then the Republican administration of President William McKinley stole their colonial empire from Spain in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines; inflicted a near genocidal war against the Filipino people; while at the same time illegally annexing the Kingdom of Hawaii and subjecting the Native Hawaiian people (who call themselves the Kanaka Miaoli) to genocidal conditions.
By John W. Whitehead
The Christmas narrative of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one.
Friday
By Edward Curtin
In a capitalist culture of commodification, people have been reified and things reanimated. Our national artists—the advertisers—have mastered this trick. People become persons through things, or the things images can secure; things possess a life of their own which they can impart to their possessors. Conversely, without such things one becomes a nobody, as the poor know so well. As long as you can convince people that objects and people are of equal value, the rest is easy. You can even declare that you are not an object to be used, even as you have bought into the culture of commodification through images.
By John W. Whitehead
I keep waiting to encounter the “kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant” Christmastime environment that Charles Dickens describes in “A Christmas Carol”: “when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”
By Adam Parsons
At this time of year, our overconsuming lifestyles in the affluent Western world are impossible to ignore. Brightly-lit shops are bursting with festive foods and expensive indulgences, while seasonal songs play in the background of shopping malls to keep us spending the money we don’t have on things we don’t need to make impressions that don’t matter.
By Philip A Farruggio
It is yuletide season once again What better book to read or film to watch than Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”?
By Ramzy Baroud
Within hours after Akayed Ullah, a Bangladeshi immigrant, allegedly detonated a pipe bomb in New York City on December 11, severely injuring himself and wounding four others, a most comprehensive official and media narrative emerged.
Comments
Post a Comment