Online community for 
Two clandestine operations during hard-fought presidential elections of the past half century shaped the modern American political era, but they remain little known to the general public and mostly ignored by historians. One unfolded in the weeks before Election 1968 and the other over a full year before Election 1980.
The killing of four Americans by Somali pirates was tragic. No excuse exists for murder. But at the risk of seeming harsh, I believe there is much contributory negligence to go around.
CNBC, the top U.S. business news channel, is running propaganda ads in support of unbridled capitalism, including a 1979 clip of right-wing economist Milton Friedman besting talk show host Phil Donahue in a debate over the merits of greed.
Amidst all the stirring political upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East, the name "Marshall Plan" keeps being repeated by political figures and media around the world as the key to rebuilding the economies of those societies to complement the political advances, which hopefully will be somewhat progressive.
Okay, I know we don’t write much about sports, but I had a thought about how to resolve one of the sticking points in the NFL negotiations with the players’ union – the issue of expanding the regular season schedule to 18 from 16 games.
The term “class war” has been extricated from the archives of another era, while divisions over the future of the economy have become a battleground in which the adversaries yell at each other, but rarely engage in any discourse with each other in a shared language.
Last week, I made another of my doomed attempts to use politeness and rationality to get people with power to correct false statements.
Many big issues fill our daily news – political upheaval in the Middle East, budget-cutting in Washington, and a challenge to public unions in Wisconsin – but there is another dark storm cloud on the horizon, the renewed battle over the issue of church and state.
There is no doubt that Julian Assange, the head of the WikiLeaks organization, and Bradley Manning, the soldier who allegedly leaked U.S. classified documents, are being singled out and made examples of by the Obama administration.
The CIA shared with George W. Bush’s Justice Department the details of how an interrogation strategy – with an emphasis on forced nudity and physical abuse – could train prisoners in “learned helplessness” and demonstrate “the complete control of Americans.”
The mysterious fortune of ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak got an early boost from millions of dollars in cash bribes delivered by CIA-connected arms merchants in the late 1970s, according to two participants.
A disorderly conduct charge against former CIA analyst Ray McGovern – for standing silently with his back to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – was dropped on Wednesday in what McGovern called a victory for the constitutional right to dissent against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In Establishment Washington, Defense Secretary Robert Gates enjoys a charmed life based on a charming persona. The Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) is always ready with fulsome praise for his “candor” and “leadership” – and even for his belated recognition that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were nuts.
If there were ever a doubt about whether the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is “a real journalist,” recent events should erase all those doubts. Indeed, they should put him at the forefront of a movement to democratize journalism and empower people.
Twenty years ago, with a resounding victory in a 100-hour ground war against Iraqi troops in Kuwait, the first Bush administration completed the restoration of a powerful public consensus, a renewed national commitment that the United States should act as the world’s imperial policeman.
Hats off to writer Matt Taibbi for staying on the Wall Street crime beat, asking in his most recent report in Rolling Stone: “Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?”
Read on.When Defense Secretary Robert Gates told West Point cadets that you’d have to be crazy to commit U.S. troops to wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, media commentators quickly detected a slap at his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who oversaw those conflicts.
If you have the stomach to listen to the likes of Glenn Beck or track the antics of people like Sarah Palin, you might get the idea that today’s American political conservatives are a bunch of radicals and extremists. And, as we will see, you would be correct.
In today’s English language, a prophet is someone who has the power to predict the future, but that is not the role of the prophets that we find in the Bible.
"More cheese, less sleaze!" That was the funniest group chant at Tuesday’s rally of several hundred union and other progressive activists outside the Manhattan headquarters of Fox News.
As the youth-led Freedom Movement of 2011 spreads rapidly across the Middle East, one can only wonder what would be happening in Iraq today if the U.S. had not invaded eight years ago.
A great tragedy of the United States is that the answer to many of the country’s domestic problems is obvious, even simple, but can’t be done because of a dominating political/media dynamic that rules that solution out.
It’s not just Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s recent efforts to strip public employees of their right to collectively bargain that have citizens of his state outraged. Walker is nothing short of a radical hell-bent on privatizing the public sector of Wisconsin.
It was not until Secretary of State Hillary Clinton walked to the George Washington University podium last week to enthusiastic applause that I decided I had to dissociate myself from the obsequious adulation of a person responsible for so much death, suffering and destruction.
Under President Barack Obama's new budget for fiscal year 2012, the Great American War Machine just rolls on and on.
Thank you Bernie for breaking your silence, even if you are still clinging to that cover-up mode you adopted since your guilty plea took all the blame for your crimes on yourself.
The inspiring moments when President Obama appeared before the cameras, and thus the world, to declare that the dictator Hosni Mubarak must step down and the people of Egypt must be given the inalienable right to self-determination are now in the past.
The national Republican leadership embraced anger during the first two years of Barack Obama’s term with rank-and-file Republicans even brandishing guns at rallies. But anger is suddenly a bad thing again, at least when expressed by public employees defending their collective bargaining rights.
The uprising in Egypt has to be added to the truly world-changing events that I have witnessed in my life. The others I would call “the big three”: World War II, the American civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War.
Forced at gunpoint this weekend to clean out a lot of old paper files in anticipation of some home improvements, I ran across some articles and obituaries I had saved following the death, a little more than five and a half years ago, of the late, great Ann Richards, former governor of Texas.
Read on.In the wake of WMD-liar Curveball's videotaped confession, Colin Powell is demanding to know why nobody warned him about Curveball's unreliability. The trouble is, they did.
Read on.Sometimes the hypocrisy is just overwhelming. So, it probably shouldn’t surprise us that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would deliver a speech hailing the peaceful protests that changed Egypt while 71-year-old Ray McGovern was roughed up and dragged away for standing quietly in protest of her support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Read on.Iranian parliamentarians presented an ugly scene on Tuesday with raucous chants calling for the executions of two opposition leaders – and the U.S. news media was quick to denounce the Iranian government – but there is a complex history that Americans aren’t getting.
Read on.A visit to the remote Reagan ranch in the mountains near Santa Barbara, California, on the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth set me thinking about Reagan’s foreign policy record.
Read on.
Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently traveled to Israel and Jordan to assure these two "partners" of the steadfast nature of U.S. loyalty.
Despite evidence that the Taliban insurgency had grown significantly in 2010, the U.S. intelligence
community failed to revise its estimate for Taliban forces as part of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan in December.
Twenty years ago, as Americans were celebrating Valentine’s Day, Iraqi husbands and fathers in the Amiriyah section of Baghdad were peeling the remains of their wives and children off the walls and floor of a large neighborhood bomb shelter.
Read on.On the long morning after, protesters returned to Tahrir Square to clean it up and savor their victory. There were even some initial scuffles with the military that may be over-anxious to assert control and show it is in charge.
One of the really progressive acts that followed the end of World War II was the establishment of the principle of universal jurisdiction (UJ), a legal process that allows states that are signatories to various international treaties and conventions (such as the Geneva conventions) to prosecute alleged violators of these treaties, even when these violations are committed outside the country’s usual jurisdiction.
With Mubarak’s departure, the focus now falls on his chosen successor, Omar Suleiman.
Read on.The unrelenting narrative from the corporate media – that Obama must mend fences with American business – is disconnected from the reality of Obama’s policies and appointments.
I’m surprised that otherwise intelligent people continue to believe the myth that the media is “liberal.” I think it’s worth discussing what a liberal media would look like if we had one, so we can better understand that we don’t have one.
Read on.As the news broke on Saturday that former President George W. Bush had abruptly canceled his scheduled appearance this week in Geneva to avoid the risk of arrest on a torture complaint, my first thought was — how humiliating, not only for Bush but, by extension, for all Americans.
Read on.The central justification of the U.S.-NATO war against the Afghan Taliban - that the Taliban would allow al Qaeda to return to Afghanistan - has been challenged by new historical evidence of offers by the Taliban leadership to reconcile with the Hamid Karzai government after the fall of the Taliban government in late 2001.
In July 1975, I went to Portugal because in April of the previous year a bloodless military coup had brought down the U.S.-supported 48-year fascist regime of Portugal.
To call the ongoing people’s revolts in Tunisia and Egypt FaceBook revolutions is certainly overstating the case.
Read on.How unseemly for New York Times executive editor Bill Keller to look down so disdainfully at WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, with a nasty ad hominem portrayal in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, “Dealing With Assange and the WikiLeaks Secrets.”
When you’re listening to the many tributes to President Ronald Reagan, often for his talent making Americans feel better about themselves, you might want to spend a minute thinking about the many atrocities in Latin America and elsewhere that Reagan aided, covered up or shrugged off in his inimitable "aw shucks" manner.
Egypt is an alarm that signals the urgent need for change in U.S. foreign policy. It provides President Obama an opportunity to transform a foreign policy that has often had the opposite effect than was sought and is undermining U.S. economic and national security.
Read on.Almost seven years have passed since I spent some time in the Middle East. The closest I get to the opinions of "the Arab street" these days is the fellow who runs the delicatessen a block away from me.
Read on.The political crisis sweeping the Middle East is another part of Ronald Reagan’s dark legacy that is shattering into chaos even as the United States prepares to lavishly celebrate his 100th birthday.
Read on.On Friday evening, Jan. 21, after reading a short story by James Thurber, titled The Scotty Who Knew Too Much, Keith Olbermann abruptly closed his program by informing his viewers it would be his last. This out-of-the-blue exit will go down in broadcast history as one of the most bizarre.
Read on.I watched Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talk about the ongoing events in Egypt. In essence, he said that if the demonstrations against the 30-year-old dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak succeeded the world could get an Iranian-style regime in Egypt and that would be the end of democracy.
Read on.Groundhog Day brings to mind various associations, including the fervent hope of this snow-buried Bostonian that Punxsutawney Phil will not see his shadow this year and spring will come early. This may be the one good thing about global warming.
Read on.With the rise of a Hezbollah-backed government in Lebanon, hand-wringing seems to be the order of the day in the American and Israeli governments.
Read on.What’s left out of a movie about history often interests only a few experts in the field. However, the release of one that chronicles the successful sub rosa American effort to bleed the Soviet Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s may prove to be an exception.
The death throes of the Mubarak regime in Egypt signal a new level of crisis for a U.S. Middle East strategy that has shown itself over and over again in recent years to be based on nothing more than the illusion of power.
The reason people in Tunisia, Egypt, and other parts of the world have been influenced to some extent by the work of WikiLeaks is that they have read or heard about the material that WikiLeaks has helped to make public.
If the recent events in Tunisia and Egypt tell us anything, it is that predicting the beginning of mass unrest is very difficult. Indeed, it is probably easier to predict the stock market.
Read on.This is an upstairs/downstairs story that takes us from the peak of a Western mountaintop for the wealthy to spreading mass despair in the valleys of the Third World poor.
Read on.In the last year of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. questioned U.S. military interventions against progressive movements in the Third World by invoking a JFK quote: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
As the United States celebrates Ronald Reagan’s centennial birthday, the defining proof of his greatness as president will be represented by two sequential film clips – Reagan in Berlin ordering Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” followed by scenes of the Berlin Wall coming down.
“Live and let live” would appear to be a simple, sensible guide to social life, but obviously many Americans reject this creed with a vengeance.
Read on.The Detroit Tigers are retiring the great baseball manager Sparky Anderson's number 11 this season. "It's a wonderful gesture," Detroit Free Press columnist Michael Rosenberg wrote. "I just wish Sparky could see it."
Read on.U.S.-Russian relations are on the upswing – with the new treaty reducing deployed long-range strategic missiles (New START), an agreement on nuclear cooperation, and an arrangement to transport supplies for NATO troops in Afghanistan through Russia. But there is much more to be done.
Tea Partiers, Republicans, and protectors of public morality are right about corruption in government.
When Yasir Arafat took over the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1969, he changed it from a tool of the Egyptian government to a dynamic united front seeking national liberation for the Palestinian people.
Read on.Whistleblowing takes many forms but almost always involves the disillusionment of an insider with the nature of what he or she is inside.
Read on.
On Sunday, I attended an informal talk given in a parish hall by the Justice Department’s Thomas Perez, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. His topic: “The way his work for justice is defined by his faith.”
All over Europe and in much of the rest of the world, a new fictional hero has engaged the fascination of millions of readers. His name is Mikael Blomkvist, and he’s the protagonist of the late Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy.
Read on.Ted Koppel, whose broadcasting career got a big boost from the Iranian-hostage crisis in 1980, doesn’t seem aware that the long-running cover-up of how Republicans sabotaged President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations has collapsed – or Koppel may simply prefer to stick with the safer version of the story.
In Ukraine, where media diversity is often defined by which powerful oligarch controls which TV station, one network, TVi -- known for its independent investigative style -- is under intense legal pressure, with its owner not part of Ukraine's power circles.
Keith Olbermann’s abrupt departure from MSNBC should be another wake-up call to American progressives about the fragile foothold that liberal-oriented fare now has for only a few hours on one corporate cable network.
Most people do not realize the meaning of being a Baptist. Theologically, we cover the full spectrum from right to left. We are scattered politically throughout Republicans, Democrats, Tea Partiers and None of the Above. Our hallmark is freedom.
Read on.
According to Laura Rozen, a journalist specializing in foreign policy matters and writing in Politico, the Obama administration is seeking "new ideas from outside experts on how to advance the [Israeli-Palestinian] peace process."
Barry Zorthian, who died last month at the age of 90, was one of the last surviving U.S government officials who shaped America’s role in the Vietnam War, a man who also stood at the shadowy intersection between press management and psychological warfare.
The continuing WikiLeaks controversy has focused needed attention on a number of important issues: whether, for example, Julian Assange was justified in releasing classified information in order to make government more accountable, whether the release of the information put U.S. intelligence sources and methods at risk, and whether the legitimate need for secrecy in certain government activities occasionally provides cover for government activities that public officials would have trouble justifying if they took place in the open.
On the eve of the Chinese President’s visit to the United States, and the intense speculation about his intentions — and ours — I found myself in a dark room at the Anthology Film Archive in the East Village watching a spectacular documentary by Chinese filmmaker Zhao Liang called “Petition.”
The American media continues to tout the reduced violence in Iraq without foreseeing the long-term potential for a resumption of severe ethno-sectarian violence and the absence of mechanisms — Ã la Sudan — to defuse it.
Read on.Fifty years after Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Jan. 17, 1961, speech on the “military-industrial complex,” the threat he identified has morphed into a far more powerful and sinister force than Eisenhower could have imagined. It has become a “Permanent War State,” with the power to keep the United States at war continuously for the indefinite future.
On Jan. 13, the Pentagon commemorated the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with an address by Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department’s general counsel, who insisted that today’s wars are not out of line with the iconic Nobel Peace Prize winner’s teachings.
Read on.A United Nations-backed tribunal, which has conducted a long and troubled investigation into the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, issued a sealed indictment on Monday amid expectations that members of Hezbollah will be blamed.
Zeev Sternhell is an Israeli historian and a recognized expert on Fascism. He is also an occasional contributor to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Read on.On Jan. 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued his prophetic warning about the military-industrial complex, anticipating the increased political, economic, military and even cultural influence of the Pentagon and its allies.
Read on.
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
