Historically, liberalism started with John Locke, whose philosophy is here superbly summarized, explained, and referenced to its sources, as I shall place in quotes from that article. Continue reading
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Britain’s clown prince new prime minister
Boris Johnson succeeded Theresa May as new Tory prime minister—chosen by Britain’s power elite, ordinary Brits having no say over their new leader. Continue reading
The ongoing dread in Gaza: So many names, so many lives
Jehad Abusalim, a Palestinian now living in the United States, grew up in Gaza. In Chicago last week, addressing activists committed to breaking the siege of Gaza, he held up a stack of 31 papers. On each page were names of 1,254 Palestinians living in Gaza who had been killed in just one month of Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge” attacks five years ago. Continue reading
Freedom Rider: The Russians are coming, for Kamala Harris
The lightweight senator hopes voters will let her party off the hook for its failures if the word Russia is repeated often enough. Continue reading
Can the party of Lincoln be racist? Absolutely
The Great Emancipator was also an open white supremacist who wanted to send freed black people ‘back to Africa.’
Republicans have a go-to line when it comes to deflecting charges of racism: We’re the party of Lincoln! Continue reading
Iran outwits Trump regime, dismantles CIA spy ring
Time and again, Iran outwitted self-styled master of the universe USA. Continue reading
‘Unconscionable’: Trump USDA proposes new rule to strip food stamps from over 3 million Americans
The proposal, said Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, would ‘take food away from families, prevent children from getting school meals, and make it harder for states to administer food assistance.’
In a move critics denounced as the Trump administration’s latest effort to bypass Congress to attack low-income families, the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Tuesday proposed a new rule that would strip food stamps from more than three million Americans. Continue reading
Are your frequent UTIs from food you’re eating?
It is no secret that many bacteria causing human infections are developing resistance to the antibiotics that used to kill them. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) calls antibiotic resistance “one of the biggest public health challenges of our time.” In the U.S., at least 2 million people get an antibiotic-resistant infection every year, and at least 23,000 of those people die. Continue reading
A tale of two drug lords
One gets life behind bars, the other retires into luxury. Guess which one wreaked more havoc.
Last week didn’t go so well for the Mexican druglord Joaquín Guzmán Loera. A federal district court sentenced the notorious “El Chapo” to life in prison. The 62-year-old will almost certainly, notes the New York Times, be “spending the rest of his life behind bars.” Continue reading
Rugged individualism cannot save us, only enlightened collectivism can
Individualism cannot save humanity from the crises it faces. It’s not the right tool. Continue reading
Trump, go back where you came from
Don’t let this presidential pickpocket use cruel verbal assaults to distract you from the truth.
Every presidential election year, Frontline, the superb investigative TV series on PBS, produces an in-depth look at the Democratic and Republican candidates. It’s called “The Choice,” and invariably offers some insights that likely you won’t see anywhere else. Continue reading
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez: Trump’s agenda driven by ‘ethnicity and racism’
At town hall event, New York Democrat says Trump "relished" racist chant directed at fellow lawmaker
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sustained her criticism of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and rhetoric on Saturday, and said that what’s driving his agenda is “ethnicity and racism.” Continue reading
The strange affair of suspension of flights to Cairo
The move is a blow to the Egypt’s tourism industry which has taken years to recover
On Saturday, Britain’s flagship carrier British Airways disappointed holidaymakers with boarding cards heading to Egypt with letters announcing cancellation of flights to Cairo for a week to allow for security assessments. No alternative flights were offered. Continue reading
Trump is back under Bolton’s thumb
President Trump might be his own man, but not when it comes to John Bolton and Israel. Trump is their man and is again being manipulated into starting a fisticuffs with Iran. Continue reading
‘He-e-e-l-p!!’: Syria, Ilhan Omar and Netroots Nation
While walking down a busy street in Philadelphia the other day after attending the Netroots Nation convention, I rounded a corner and there was Bernie Sanders—giving a speech to a crowd of protestors who were angry because their only accessible hospital was being torn down by a Los Angeles developer in order to make way for said developer’s upscale condominium project. Continue reading
Pandering to Christian Zionism: Trump outreach on display in Washington
In Washington on the weekend after the Fourth of July, Israel was praised and Iran was condemned in the strongest terms, with a bit of a call to arms thrown in to prepare the nation for an inevitable war. It might just seem like a normal work week in the nation’s capital, but this time around there was a difference. The rhetoric came from no less than five senior officials in the Trump administration and the audience consisted of 5,000 cheering members from the Christian Zionist evangelical group called Christians United for Israel (CUFI). Continue reading
Rural America and the 5G digital divide
While there is considerable telecom hubris regarding the 5G rollout and increasing speculation that the next generation of wireless is not yet ready for prime time, the industry continues to make promises to rural America that it has no intention of fulfilling. Decades-long promises to deliver digital Utopia to rural America by T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T have never materialized. Continue reading
‘A hotter future that’s hard to imagine’: Super-charged by climate crisis, new study warns of ‘killer heat’ set to overtake US
If we wish to spare people in the United States and around the world the mortal dangers of extreme and relentless heat, there is little time to do so and little room for half measures.’
Without urgent international action to address runaway global heating, there will be almost no communities or regions in the contiguous United States unaffected as the number of lethally hot days each year—including those characterized as “off-the-charts” hot—doubles by mid-century and quadruples by the year 2100. Continue reading
Twitter restores Assange activism account in response to backlash
After a week of vocal protests from online supporters of Julian Assange, Twitter has reversed its unjust removal of the prominent pro-Assange activism account @Unity4J. Continue reading
Weapons of the weak
Americans are used to arguments about identity, but one of the most common coping mechanisms of impacted people is to remain silent.
As I navigate life as a queer disabled woman, I frequently think of Yale political scientist James C. Scott’s concept of the “weapons of the weak.” Continue reading
Washington vs. the Squad
Trump’s not the only one terrified of these four congresswomen—leading Democrats apparently are, too.
You’ve heard the cliche: If you’re taking heat from “both sides,” you must be doing something right. It’s dubious advice, but it fits pretty well for “the Squad”—the progressive first-year Reps. Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar. Continue reading
It’s un-American to be anti-free speech
Unjust. Brutal. Criminal. Corrupt. Inept. Greedy. Power-hungry. Racist. Immoral. Murderous. Evil. Dishonest. Crooked. Excessive. Deceitful. Untrustworthy. Unreliable. Tyrannical. Continue reading
It’s our choice, socialism or barbarism
There is no doubt that people, especially the young, are experiencing less difficulty and anxiety mentioning and even conversing about socialism as a construct. Unfortunately, most progressives are still reluctant to mention socialism or consider it as an alternative and are engaged in maintaining a capitalist structure and fighting to make it kinder and gentler. Continue reading
Who killed Oscar and Valeria: The inconvenient history of the refugee crisis
History never truly retires. Every event of the past, however inconsequential, reverberates throughout and, to an extent, shapes our present, and our future as well. Continue reading
How corporate welfare hurts you
You often hear Trump and Republicans in Congress railing against so-called “welfare programs”—by which they mean programs that provide health care or safety nets to ordinary Americans. Continue reading
Reporting on Trump as an aberration
There is no reason why any journalist worth his or her salt should be treating Donald Trump and his dysfunctional administration as anything other than an aberration. To normalize Trump is to act as an instrument of his propaganda machinery, which has borrowed heavily from Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, as well as apparatchiks’ playbooks found in information ministries in countless tinpot dictatorships that have existed throughout recent history. Continue reading
Soros and Koch co-found new think tank to restore Obama’s Iran policy
Usually, America’s Republican billionaires are obsessed against Iran, and America’s Democratic billionaires are obsessed against Russia, but nonetheless on June 30, the Boston Globe’s columnist Stephen Kinzer exaggerated when he headlined, “In an astonishing turn, George Soros and Charles Koch team up to end US ‘forever war’ policy” and he reported that, “the leftist financier George Soros and the right-wing Koch brothers have little in common. They could be seen as polar opposites.” There actually is no such basic disagreement amongst America’s billionaires regarding foreign policies, as there is regarding domestic policies—on which topics they indeed are as far apart as liberals and conservatives are. Continue reading
Freedom Rider: The Trump and Pelosi lovefest
Trump and Pelosi are birds of a feather when it comes to beating up on dissident women of color. Continue reading
CNN fake news about Julian Assange
CNN stands out as the most untrustworthy name in airing utter rubbish masquerading as television news—featuring a daily drumbeat of managed news misinformation, disinformation, and Big Lies. Continue reading
National polls don’t mean much. Here’s why.
“Here we go with the Fake Polls,” President Donald Trump tweeted on July 15. “Just like what happened with the Election against Crooked Hillary Clinton.” He’s complaining about several polls that show him losing the national popular vote to various Democratic presidential aspirants, in some cases by double digits. Continue reading
‘Hysterical and stupid’: Kushner reveals his attitude towards the Palestinians
Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and the person Trump appointed to broker a Middle East peace agreement recently called Palestinians “hysterical and stupid.” That is particularly galling language coming from a notorious New Jersey, New York, and Maryland slumlord and the son of a federally convicted criminal. Kushner’s father and real estate mogul, Charles Kushner, spent fourteen months in prison after being convicted of tax fraud and witness tampering, among other crimes. Jared Kushner believes his father was wrongly convicted and imprisoned. But the wunderkind son-in-law of Trump has no problem in maintaining the status quo in the Middle East, one that has led to the large-scale incarceration of the people of the Gaza Strip in virtual desert ghetto. Continue reading
America’s other desperate caravan
While Trump demonizes Central Americans, he ignores those desperate U.S. citizens also driven north—to Canada—by drug prices.
Posted on July 26, 2019 by Jim Hightower
While Donald Trump fans the embers of xenophobia in our country by demonizing caravans of desperate Central Americans headed north, there are other northern-bound caravans he doesn’t mention. Continue reading →