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THOMAS JEFFERSON: Pizza’s here!

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: What’s on this? Is this blue cheese?

JOHN ADAMS: Can I have a piece with less blue cheese on it?

JEFFERSON: Just pick it off.

ADAMS: Can someone help me cut my slice into smaller pieces?

JEFFERSON: Sure, John.

ADAMS: It’s so spicy!

JEFFERSON: Don’t be a wimp, John. You said you liked buffalo sauce.

ADAMS: This one just has, like, more buffalo sauce than I normally get.

JEFFERSON: Well, you guys said, “Surprise us!” so there you go. We should have just gotten pepperoni.

FRANKLIN: No, it’s fine. I’m pepperonied out. I ate so much charcuterie in France.

Rupert Murdoch, who has for decades championed Israel’s cause, is now pushing his media empire into overdrive to defend the indefensible. If the pen is indeed mightier than the sword, then Murdoch is one of Israel’s most powerful weapons.

The post Rupert Murdoch: Israel’s Most Powerful Supporter appeared first on MintPress News.

"Sites like Words of Iron are scaring other content creators from posting about Palestine. They’re chilling free speech, and that’s what they aim to do.” -- Rosy Pirani

The post Free Speech Under Fire: How Israel’s Tech Guard Is Killing Free Speech Online appeared first on MintPress News.

With a new invasion of Khan Yunis, the Israeli military's claims of defeating Hamas are called into question, as refugees suffer and fighting continues unabated.

The post Israel Is Set To ReInvade Central Gaza’s Khan Yunis, Exposing Military Failures appeared first on MintPress News.

In 1973 the Senate Watergate Committee uncovered a plan that had been hatched three years earlier by a man named Tom Charles Huston, a White House liaison to the Interagency Committee on Intelligence (ICI), a group chaired FBI Director  J. Edgar Hoover to monitor “left wing radicals.” The Huston Plan, as it was known, laid out detailed operations to burglarize the homes and conduct electronic surveillance of these co-called radicals and even detain anti-war protesters in camps to be created in western states. President Richard Nixon signed off on the plan only to rescind his approval a few days later under objections from Hoover himself. It was one of a number of nefarious plots uncovered during the investigations, including the actual burglarizing of Pentagon Papers whistle blower Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, an order to bomb the Brooking s Institute and the Watergate burglary itself. The Huston Plan was one that was never carried out but went directly to the president who signed the order.

The debate made it clear that Biden is in serious decline. Remember that it’s not just about now, it’s about four years from now. The media has turned on him hard, and so have many in the Democratic party.

My first takeaway from the debate was that Biden if Democrats were honest and honorable, they would have already forced him to step down, using the 25th amendment. Being President is a hard job, and he’s not up to it. The Vice-President exists for a reason.

ZEITmagazin: Professor Walzer, is Israel waging a just war against Hamas? Michael Walzer: Yes. Of central importance, however, is the distinction between ius ad bellum, the just reason for going to war, and ius in bello, the just conduct in a war. The massacre of October 7 is a just cause for going to war; Israel obviously has […]

by Brian Czech

Perhaps you’ve heard: Autocracy is on the march. Not just in the obvious places like Russia, China, and North Korea. Democracy has been declining throughout the world for decades, sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly, but invariably replaced by autocratic tendencies, politicians, and states.

What’s going on in places as far-flung as Hungary, Myanmar, and Nicaragua? Why, after the lessons of world wars, the Cold War,

The post Democracy Trumped at the Limits to Growth appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

MAGA hates you. They really hate you. Maybe the problem with getting people to understand the threat posed by Donald Trump, by MAGA, and by Project 2025 is that it has no face. In the wake of the Supreme Court making the president a de facto king, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts just gave it one. Yes, the “radical left” is the enemy MAGA will defeat “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” And if we resist? The Biden-Harris campaign put a short clip on social media. Brian Beutler, responds, “Incredible to me that this stuff only surfaces because the Biden campaign and media watchdog types tweet it out. To the extent it figures into campaign coverage at all (even pre-debate) it’s just ho-hum, in passing, nbd, etc.” Actress Taraji P. Henson made a plea for paying attention during the BET Awards on Sunday. “The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up!” No, it’s not a game, confirms Nicole Wallace.

The Reform Party is hovering around 18% of the vote, yet Farage's and his party's Facebook posts generated six times more reactions and shares than either Labour or the Conservatives and their leaders

Is there a chance that - despite a Labour landslide on Thursday, Keir Starmer’s own seat is in trouble?

Absent from hustings, media interviews, and social media, why are Nigel Farage's Reform champions quite so elusive?

Voters are about to hack First Past the Post on an epic scale

When COVID struck Rebecca Saltzman’s family, the virus unmasked a life-changing discovery: her husband and two of their kids had genetic heart disease. The kind where people drop dead. As their healthy wife and mother, Saltzman had a new role too—guiding her family through what Susan Sontag called the Kingdom of the Sick. In this column, she explores the anthropological strangeness of this new place, the mysteries of the body, and how facing death distills life into its purest form: funny, terrifying, and sublime.

Read past installments of this column.

Biden must go? And then what? Will Bunch observes: Over the course of a remarkable weekend, I saw the best minds of my boomer generation destroyed by madness — newspaper columnists and other big shots convinced they were cosplayers in a real-world episode of The West Wing, saving America by giving chief of staff Leo McGarry the best words to convince an ailing President Bartlet that it’s time to step down. Democrats, many of them, are panicked over President Joe Biden’s debate performance on Thursday. This is one time Democrats really do seem in disarray. The press is having a field day, of course. But reporters are wary enough of being blamed for holding the drum while the “Biden must go” team beats it that Brian Stelter tells CNN it is no longer us (the press) but Democratic officials turning against Biden. In the grocery store, online, on listservs, and in calls, “Biden can’t win” blares self-fulfilling prophecy in spite of the fact that, at least in the polls, there is no Biden free fall. One in three Democrats believes Biden should leave the presidential race, a Reuters/Ipsos poll that concluded Tuesday finds.

‘An era can be said to end,’ wrote playwright Arthur Miller, ‘when its basic illusions are exhausted.’ Such exhaustion is palpable in Britain today. Everybody knows that the Thatcherite economic model of the past forty years is failing, with infrastructure crumbling, wages stagnating and public services at breaking point. And yet, a largely empty general […]

If someone’s go-to Fourth of July song is Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” they’re conservative.

If their go-to Fourth of July song is “American Tune” by Paul Simon, they’re liberal.

If it’s “This is America” by Childish Gambino, they’re liberal, and they’re not celebrating.

If a man is wearing a graphic tee with George Washington riding a bald eagle while wielding an AK-47, he’s conservative, but if the shirt features Ulysses S. Grant punching a bear in the face, he’s liberal.

If a woman is wearing oversized red, white, or blue sunglasses, she’s conservative. If the sunglasses are undersized, she’s liberal.

If a man is wearing a Pepsi-bezel Rolex GMT (the red and blue one with the obnoxiously big bubble on the date), he’s conservative. However, if a woman wears the same watch, she’s liberal. It’s rare but not unheard of for them to be married to each other.

If the party features a tie-dye station, the crowd is 89 percent liberal.

A roundup of The Lever’s best recent longreads.

Explained: How malicious bots and other automated programmes are used to spread misinformation - and how widespread they are

This election Compass is only backing candidates who recognise the "farce" of FPTP and will push to remove it in the next parliament

"The way David Meller speaks about his own family members when they are not around shows his true colours"