You might be tempted to think that the US and UK would learn from their mistakes in the Middle East. This would, however, be an error. The attack on Yemen shows exactly how much they keep repeating the same mistakes in the increasingly forlorn hope that this time the action will succeed. Yemen has suffered […]
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And embracing the darkness Greg Sargent: Pundits: Trump voters support him because they’ve lost faith in meritocracy/our institutions Trump voters: Actually, we agree with him that immigrants are poisoning our blood and we like his promise to prosecute our enemies without cause Pundits: It’s the meritocracy, right? Yes, there’s more. Trump’s prepared to budget enough gold leaf to cover the White House and the Capitol. His followers long for a dictator. Trump wants to normalize the unthinkable, says Ruth Ben Ghiat, and not be held accountable for it. And that’s okay by his followers. Laws are for other people. Update: Found a gag reel, and not in the humor sense.
Less than a century after it began, the popular lexicon of the Holocaust has become threadbare. It is so reduced to a few suggestive and…
Without needing recognition Heather Cox Richardson offers a reflection on heroes for Martin Luther King Day: You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left. When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them. It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself, in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did. It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.
Robert Fico rode to electoral victory for the third time on a wave of strongman populism, media capture and pro-Russia rhetoric. But are the cracks beginning to appear?
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DiEM25 was born in 2016 to counter the oligarchies that control and influence the lives of European citizens. How has the situation changed in recent years? Our mission has failed. Instead of being democratised, power within the EU has become even more concentrated and opaque. As we had predicted, because it was not democratised, the […]
The post On the state of Europe (its Economy, Treaties, Migration, Italy&Greece) – interviewed by FOTOSINTHESI appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
Privatisation and austerity don’t cut costs: they just pass them on to us. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 12th January 2024 The weather was worse than forecast. By the time I reached Bristol, at 5pm, all trains to the south-west had been cancelled, because of rising flood waters. It was no one’s fault […]
In Liverpool last October, the Labour Leader’s Office issued an edict saying that no one at conference could say anything on Palestine other than to echo Keir Starmer’s words condemning Hamas and proclaiming Israel’s right to self-defence. Reading the script provided by Israeli embassies around the world, the UK, US and many other Western governments […]
The best method is always the one that yields the most convincing and relevant answers in the context at hand. We all have our preferred methods that we think are underused. My own personal favorites are cross-tabulations and graphs that stay close to the data; the hard work lies in deciding what to put into […]
This is an election year in the UK and unless something dramatically changes, the Labour Party will be in power for the next term of Parliament and will have to manage a poly crisis that they will inherit from 40 or more years of neoliberalism. Note, I don’t confine the antecedents to the Tory period…
Do Israel’s actions in Gaza—the bombing of hospitals, apartments, and entire towns; policies of forced...
Well, he made a mistake
They are like holding elections on NextDoor.com The Washington Post reports: Bob Ray has participated in Iowa’s Republican caucuses in the past, but not this year. Ray is blind, and with snow clogging the roads and subzero temperatures gripping the state, showing up on Monday is a non-starter. “I’m 75 years old, and I’m not going to want to get out that night,” he said. To some here, the Iowa caucuses are an exemplar of democracy, binding communities together and allowing everyday voters to connect with candidates who, a year from now, may be running the country. To others, they are an antiquated system that excludes those who — due to a disability, a work shift, a flat tire, child care needs, extreme weather or any other factor — can’t turn up on the one night every four years when Iowa voters get a say in picking presidential nominees. Voters must be at their precincts at 7 p.m. Central time on Monday, where they will hear speeches from representatives of the candidates, fill out ballots and, if they want, observe as the votes get tallied. No early or absentee voting is allowed, except for a tiny number of military service members.
With recent polls giving Donald Trump a reasonable chance of defeating President Biden in the November elections, commentators have begun predicting what his second presidency might mean for domestic politics. In a dismally detailed Washington Post analysis, historian Robert Kagan argued that a second Trump term would feature his “deep thirst for vengeance” against what the ex-president has called the “radical Left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country,” thereby launching what Kagan calls “a regime of political persecution” leading to “an irreversible descent into dictatorship.” So far, however, Trump and the media that follow his every word have been largely silent about what his reelection would mean for U.S. foreign policy. Citing his recent promise... Read more
Source: Trump the Terminator? appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
For no particular reason.
They lose even when they cheat The Prince William County Office of Elections in northern Virginia has confessed to an underreporting error in the 2020 presidential election results on Thursday, January 11. The error resulted in a margin of victory for President Joe Biden over Donald Trump that was 4,000 votes lower than reported. This admission comes after the discovery of discrepancies in vote counts as part of a criminal case in 2022. Eric Olsen, the current registrar of the county, has clarified that the errors did not significantly impact the outcome of any race, according to WTOP News. Although the counts were also off for the US Senate and US House of Representatives races, the discrepancies in these cases were less significant. Mistakes do happen and that’s probably all this was. But imagine if the discrepancy had favored Biden. It would be screaming headlines on right wing media. Trump would never shut up about it.
A rise in the polls for Opposition leader Peter Dutton has forced the country to rethink what it would be like should the member for Dixon were to become Prime Minister. For his colleague, the former deputy Prime Minister Barnaby... Read More ›