Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the corporate “mainstream” media make quite a pair. We’re hearing a very “balanced” debate over whether KSM should be tried in New York City, and whether the most insane objections to that proposal are really insane or not. But what are we not hearing?
Let’s set aside for a moment the ludicrous propaganda that maintains that the reason we occupy other people’s countries is to impose democracy on them. Let’s assume we’re imposing the rule of elite experts. Even so, even on those terms, here are some possible responses to this line of thinking. While spokepeople for the U.S. military (including television news experts) are certainly the experts at war, they are not the experts at peace. If the question is one of choosing between war and peace, or deciding whether warlike or peacelike means will best reach some desired end, then why only include one type of expert opinion?
The United States of America owes much of the hope it has right now of remaining what John Adams called “a nation of laws, not men” to Italian law enforcement. Were it not for the fact that Italian prosecutors, unlike their American counterparts, answer to the law rather than a president, the enforcement of laws against a massive crime spree by U.S. officials (and their Italian accomplices) would not have begun.
Around the United States, peace groups are engaged in effective campaigns against proposed new military installations, local funding of weapons companies, and the routine destruction of the environment and of workers’ health by such companies. Activists are building better media outlets, educating young people, educating old people, keeping military testing and recruiting out of schools, and discouraging the Army from building real-weapon video arcades in shopping malls. But when it comes to stopping our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, our citizens are less clear how to go about it.
Congressman Anthony Weiner, D-New York, has agreed with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi not to have a floor vote on his Medicare for All bill. A press release from Congressmen Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (sponsor of HR 676, a single payer bill) opposing it helped tip the scale.
Presidential power has been on a pathway of expansion beyond what the Constitution outlined, and what a government of, by, and for the people requires, since George Washington was president. That expansion, which hit the highway after World War II, got a turbo boost during the co-presidency of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
If someone told you that a bunch of low-income people, most of them African-American or Latino, most of them women, most of them elderly, had been victimized by a predatory mortgage lender that stripped them of much of their equity or of their entire homes, you might not be surprised.
Fox News screaming head Glenn Beck now tells President Obama to fire White House employees, and Obama obeys.
While Obama presumably believes obedience will cause Beck to like him and begin praising him, Beck is building a list of additional people whose heads he will demand and denouncing Obama as hiding vast secrets by having [...]
It sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been allowed a third term as president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now living (and dying) through it.
Hurricane Katrina is not as sexy as torture, but has killed more people and ruined more lives, and — like many non-natural disasters in recent years — has a chief culprit who has now settled in at 10141 Daria Place, Dallas, Texas, where he clears very little brush.
