'…a major destabilizing influence'
I cried again this morning. Tears just burst out as I was dusting the house. I’d set Leonard Cohen’s album “The Future” on the record player to accompany my house chores. Give me back the Berlin wall Give me Stalin and St. Paul Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima Destroy another fetus now We …
Continue reading “Lament for a future in memory of Leonard Cohen”
I shake my head, And frown into A virtual page of white — This screen — That lights my face In this otherwise dark room That we have been trying to heat Against the storm That blows as if to extinguish Our little box of light. The white of the screen Mimics the white Of …
The time has come to cut the US military down to size. Last November, the Pentagon admitted what critics have known for years: It cannot pass an audit that would let Congress, the media and taxpayers know what it does with the trillions of dollars that have been lavished on war and preparing for war …
Continue reading “Saving America and the World by Slashing US Military Spending”
I have been boycotting products for political reasons since 1973, when the United Farmworkers (UFW), beset by a campaign by the then totally corrupt International Brotherhood of Teamsters to challenge their union in collusion with the California grape and lettuce growers, restarted their nationwide grape boycott, eventually adding lettuce and wine producers. I was living …
Continue reading “US Politicians are Selling Out 1st Amendment and Country for AIPAC Cash”
I just listened to Joe Biden’s seventeen-and-a-half minute 2003 eulogy for his political friend Strom Thurmond, the former Dixiecrat segregationist from South Carolina who became a Republican in 1964. It’s clear Biden liked the man, who he worked closely with to pass crime bills in the early 1980s. As Thurmond’s replacement as chairman of the …
In a huge potential break in the long-running and controversial case of Philadelphia journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, currently in Pennsylvania’s SCI Mahanoy prison serving a life-without-parole term for murder, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office says it has discovered six banker storage boxes of materials about the case in a locked storeroom of the DA’s offices at …
Continue reading “A Potentially Tectonic Event Shakes up the Mumia Abu-Jamal Case”
There is pressure, especially from some newly elected Democrats in the House of Representatives, for impeaching President Trump. This is being opposed by more cautious House leaders and especially by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), who fear that an impeachment effort would simply energize Trump supporters and restore flagging support for him among Republicans as …
Continue reading “The House Must Hold Impeachment Hearings on Trump’s Constitutional Crimes”
Liberals have been calling for the new Democratic House to file articles of impeachment against Donald Trump ever since winning the House in the Nov. 8 election in 2016, but there has been this obstacle: Nobody believes that Republicans who control the Senate will allow a House impeachment to move to a trial in the …
It’s easy to let time and nostalgia get in the way of remembering what American journalism was really like back in the last century. Certainly it was not all Watergate and Pentagon Papers exposés, and even those two prime examples of the media’s standing up to government threats and taking on the powerful were not …
Continue reading “Where Did the Tradition of Journalists Speaking Truth to Power Go?”
No other country in the world symbolizes the decline of the American empire as much as Afghanistan. – Robert Kaplan, New York Times, January 1, 2019 Robert Kaplan is too much of an imperialist-military cheerleader for my taste. His 2005 book, Imperial Grunts, was an account of travels around the world reporting on the US …