The hand count of 2.1 million paper ballots from 2020’s presidential election in Arizona’s most populous county has reached a turning point. Inside Phoenix’s Veterans Memorial Coliseum, the last boxes of ballots—said by observers to hold the final votes that lifted Joe Biden to a 2020 victory in Maricopa County and statewide—have been manually tallied. Continue reading
After the United States Senate and House in quick succession passed a federal bill to make “Juneteenth” a federal holiday to commemorate the end of slavery, President Joe Biden wasted no time in signing the bill into law. “Making Juneteenth a federal holiday is a major step forward to recognize the wrongs of the past,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, expressing what has come to be his party’s standard performative gesturing toward historic racial injustices by a party that likes to set itself apart from Republicans via lip service to liberal ideals. Continue reading
WASHINGTON—The Washington Post’s glaring conflicts of interest have of late once again been the subject of scrutiny online, thanks to a new article denouncing a supposed attempt to “soak” billionaires in taxes. Written by star columnist Megan McArdle—who previously argued that Walmart’s wages are too high, that there is nothing wrong with Google’s monopoly, and that the Grenfell Fire was a price worth paying for cheaper buildings—the article claimed that Americans have such class envy that the government would “destroy [billionaires’] fortunes so that the rest of us don’t have to look at them.” Notably, the Post chose to illustrate it with a picture of its owner, Jeff Bezos, making it seem as if it was directly defending his power and wealth, something they have been accused of on more than one occasion. Continue reading
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is as much American as he is Israeli. While other Israeli leaders have made their strong relationship with Washington a cornerstone in their politics, Netanyahu’s political style was essentially American from the start. Continue reading
Back in the mid-nineteen-fifties, the prolific, progressive political economist, Harvard’s John Kenneth Galbraith, developed his “theory of countervailing powers.” He asserted as big business got bigger, its overreach would be constrained by strong labor unions, regulators, and antitrust enforcement. Inside the realm of large companies, big retail chains could check the power of large manufacturers. Continue reading
On the evening of July 17, 2016, as delegates, media, and VIPs gathered for a Republican National Convention eve “Welcome to Cleveland” bash at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the shore of Lake Erie, Tucker Carlson, who is increasingly using his Fox News program to tout lunatic conspiracy theories, hosted a hush-hush strictly invitation-only dinner meeting at the downtown Hilton Hotel. Carlson recently brandished a new bit of lunacy by stating that this year’s January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was planned and carried out by the FBI. Continue reading
For the past few months, Republicans have been waging a ferocious political battle to end federal unemployment benefits, based upon stated desires of saving the U.S. economy from a serious labor shortage. The logic, in the words of Republican politicians like Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, goes like this: “the government pays folks more to stay home than to go to work,” and therefore, “[p]aying people not to work is not helpful.” The conservative Wall Street Journal has been beating the drum for the same argument, saying recently that it was a “terrible blunder” to pay jobless benefits to unemployed workers. Continue reading
Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government. Continue reading
On May 25, famous American actor Mark Ruffalo tweeted an apology for suggesting that Israel is committing ‘genocide’ in Gaza. Continue reading
President Richard Nixon had his infamous “Enemies List.” However, as pointed out by veterans of the Watergate scandal, Nixon never went as far as Donald Trump in subpoenaing the communications of members of the press and Democratic members of Congress. The Trump Justice Department, through Attorneys General Jeff Session and William Barr and acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, sought and received the private communications of reporters for CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, as well as the editor of WayneMadsenReport.com. Also sought were the emails and phone records of then-White House Counsel Don McGahn and his wife, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Intelligence Committee member Eric Swalwell (D-CA). In addition, before it decided to drop the subpoena, the Biden Justice Department sought the identities of the on-line readers of a particular February USA Today story on the killing of two FBI agents in Florida by a child pornography suspect. Continue reading
Here’s a thought-provoking bumper sticker: “The system is fixed. We must break it.” Continue reading
Texas is showing us all how the corruption that has overwhelmed the GOP has reached a crisis point, and it’s killing people. Continue reading
Juneteenth has become the latest iteration of liberal capture of Black politics, opportunistic virtue signaling, and the intentional misrepresentation of America’s history. Continue reading
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott became the latest Republican state leader to approve legislation aimed at controlling public school teachers’ ability to accurately teach U.S. history and discuss current events, signing a bill late Tuesday that bars educators from including “critical race theory” in their classroom work. Continue reading
As Peru’s Marxist presumptive president-elect, Pedro Castillo, stands on the verge of being named certified as the official victor of the president election, he is heading for a showdown with the interventionist Samantha Power, the former US ambassador to the United Nations under Barack Obama. While at the UN, Power was a major proponent of U.S. military intervention in the Syrian, Yemeni, and Libyan civil wars. Continue reading
Pedro Castillo of the Perú Libre party has already begun to receive congratulations from around the world. It is beyond doubt that he won the June 6 presidential election. The Peruvian electoral authority, ONPE, announced the final results: Castillo won 50.127 percent of the vote (8.84 million votes), while his opponent in the second round, Keiko Fujimori of Fuerza Popular, won 49.873 percent (8.79 million votes). This is with 100 percent of the votes. By all accounts, Fujimori has lost the election. Continue reading
The world has been treated to successive spectacles of national leaders gathering at a G7 Summit in Cornwall and a NATO Summit in Brussels. Continue reading
No matter what happens at today’s summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin in Geneva, a grim reality is that Democratic Party leaders have already hobbled its potential to move the world away from the worsening dangers of nuclear war. After nearly five years of straining to depict Donald Trump as some kind of Russian agent—a depiction that squandered vast quantities of messaging without electoral benefits—most Democrats in Congress are now locked into a modern Cold War mentality that endangers human survival. Continue reading
Connecting the civic community with the mainstream media is no minor endeavor. Historically, this connection has been essential to a functioning democracy. The citizenry is the taproot of democracy and a key source for journalists’ declared function of informing the people. Continue reading
Progressive calls to add seats to the U.S. Supreme Court gained fresh urgency Monday after Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested he would block President Joe Biden from filling a potential high court vacancy if Republicans wrest back control of the upper chamber in next year’s midterms. Continue reading
Between daycare closures, school closures, and nursing homes becoming hotbeds for the deadly virus, the COVID-19 pandemic turned millions of people into caregivers overnight. Continue reading
After 12 years, Israel finally inaugurated a new prime minister. While being hailed by many as the opportunity for a fresh start, Naftali Bennett is at best a continuer of Netanyahu’s policies and at worst an ideologue whose positions are to the right of Netanyahu’s. Continue reading
We are led to believe that history is being made in Israel following the formation of an ideologically diverse government coalition which, for the first time, includes an Arab party, Ra’am, or the United Arab List. Continue reading
In totalitarian regimes they have massacres and wars. In free democracies they have humanitarian interventions. Continue reading
Covering a third of the planet’s land surface, forests are massive carbon sinks, absorbing and storing carbon dioxide and keeping it out of the atmosphere where it would contribute to global warming. Only the world’s oceans store more carbon. Keeping forests intact has long been considered essential to maintaining a healthy planetary environment, but scientists are now beginning to understand just how critical they are in the fight against climate change. Continue reading
Who hasn’t had difficulty just getting through the multi-layered, often automated call center of your telephone company? Never mind getting a solution to your problem in due time. Continue reading
West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin represents the last of the segregationist southern Democrats, once known as the Dixiecrats. The term Dixiecrats was the slang term given to the breakaway States’ Rights Democratic Party who followed South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond out of the party in 1948 in protest of the desegregation policies of President Harry S Truman. In 1964, Thurmond left the Democratic Party to support GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. By 1968, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon cemented Republican control over the Dixiecrats by adopting his “Southern Strategy,” which saw the Republican Party adopt many of the anti-civil rights policies of the Dixiecrats. Continue reading
America’s super rich are seeing red over ProPublica’s bombshell release of data from their tax returns—and so are America’s tax collectors. Treasury Department officials have already referred this “illegal” and “unauthorized disclosure of confidential government information” to the FBI. Merrick Garland, the U.S. attorney general, has pledged to lawmakers that finding the source of the leak to ProPublica “will be at the top of my list.” Continue reading
Ditching fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy in order to keep warming below the 1.5ºC threshold is both “necessary and technically feasible.” Continue reading
Was SARS-COV-2—the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic—created (or at least weaponized by being made transmissible to and between humans) in a Chinese research lab? Was it then leaked, accidentally or intentionally, from that lab into the human population? It’s impossible to overstate the explosive potential of a provable “yes” answer to those two questions. Continue reading
ProPublica’s bombshell report on America’s super-wealthy paying little or nothing in taxes reveals not only their humongous wealth but also how they’ve parlayed that wealth into political power to shrink their taxes to almost nothing. Continue reading
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Nuclear arms reduction: Actions speak louder than words
Posted on June 22, 2021 by Thomas L. Knapp
On June 16, US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a Joint Statement on Strategic Stability, in which they “reaffirm the principle that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” and “seek to lay the groundwork for future arms control and risk reduction measures.” Continue reading →