What Took Down ACORN May Take Down the Rest of Us

In Seymour Hersh’s new account of his career, Reporter: A Memoir, he recalls that Martin Luther King Jr. told him upon the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that he planned to register 900,000 Negroes to vote. King would go on to oppose war and organize poor people across racial lines before being killed.

In a new film called ACORN and the Firestorm we’re told that ACORN registered 833,113 poor people to vote in 2008. read more

Tangier Island Is The Earth

It’s nice to look down on the poor foolish residents of Tangier Island, a little speck of land sinking into the Chesapeake Bay. Some 87% of the residents who voted in 2016, voted for Trump. The Mayor of Tangier says that being mayor is only his second job; his first is killing some of what remain of the crabs in the Bay. Residents imagine that the U.S. government will save their island from going under by building a wall. They imagine that Trump will make that happen. Yet Trump famously told read more

How to make tourists unwelcome and citizens sick: Welcome to Police-State America, Weary Traveler

By Dave Lindorff

My wife Joyce and I came home last week from a three-week trip to Manila in the Philippines, and to Hong Kong and Beijing in China.

Even though Philippines President Rodrigo Dutarte has an ongoing program of murdering drug dealers on the streets, and China has a penchant for locking up critics of the regime — even Nobel Laureates — and beating up and arresting journalists, there was only one place on that jaunt where I personally read more

Trumperial Presidency

A January 29th letter from the U.S. president’s lawyer Marc Kasowitz claims that the president cannot possibly obstruct justice, can refuse a subpoena to testify, and cannot be indicted while president. The letter also seems to claim that he can pardon himself for his crimes. The hope that such a reading misinterpreted the letter was pretty well smashed when the same president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani said this weekend that the Constitution says the president can pardon himself.

Here’s what read more

Tomgram: Engelhardt, What Can’t Be Walled Out — or In

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Duck-and-Cover America
Advice to College Graduates in the Age of Trump
By Tom Engelhardt

Class of 2018, I’ve always been told that a joke’s a good way to launch any talk. It’s a matter of breaking the ice, though on your graduation day, with the temperature soaring into the upper eighties, that may not be the perfect image. Still, you know what I mean: an attempt to lighten read more

Talk Nation Radio: Greg Shupak: Media Tells Wrong Story About Palestine

Greg Shupak is the author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, and the Media, which can be purchased on the website of OR Books. He has a PhD in Literary Studies and teaches Media Studies at the University of Guelph in Toronto. His fiction has appeared in a wide range of literary journals and he regularly writes analysis of politics and media for a variety of outlets including Electronic Intifada, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, In These Times, Jacobin, read more

Memorial Day THIS

“Memorial Day is a time to remember, appreciate, and honor the selfless patriots who gave the ultimate sacrifice in service to freedom. At a time when our country seems so divided, we must not forget that it is because of their service and sacrifice that we live in the most free and prosperous nation on Earth.” —Congressman Tom Garrett

It would be difficult to count all of the lies in the above statement. Let’s just highlight a few.

Let’s start with “most free.”

The British-based Legatum read more