Talk Nation Radio: Keeping the F-35 Out of Burlington

Our guest, James Marc Leas, is a Vermont attorney and a past co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild Free Palestine Subcommittee. He has been a leader of a campaign to block the stationing of F-35 jets in Burlington, Vermont, and of the formation of a Vermont chapter of World Beyond War. Jimmy Leas, welcome back to Talk Nation Radio.

Petition to cancel the F-35:
https://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=12514

How to contact the Mayor of Burlington and politely ask him not read more

Don’t Deport Non-Veterans Either, Unless It’s Donald Trump

We’re hearing a lot about U.S. veterans being deported, just as we hear about healthcare and retirement and homelessness and countless other topics as impacting veterans in particular. The implication, and often the explicit assertion, is that we should especially care about injustice when it hurts veterans, because they’ve especially earned the right to be treated decently, by participating in the greatest mass-murdering crime sprees of recent decades — the wars that most of us (and may read more

Who Calls Anyone “Civilized?” – Cathy Breen

Photo: Building in Mosul decimated by bombing, March 2018. Abu Mohammed.

March 31, 2018

Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet and professor of Creative Writing at Texas State. Her father was Palestinian and a refugee journalist. In one of her poems after 9/11, entitled “Blood,” she writes:

I call my father, we talk around the news.
It is too much for him,
neither of his two languages can reach it.
I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,
to plead
read more

A crazy thought: Is Trump Going Off the Rails or Possibly Getting Back on Track?

By Dave Lindorff

            Here’s a bizarre contrarian thought — one admittedly based on limited and dubious evidence and that flies in the face of a more than a year’s contrary evidence, and that is more along the lines of a desperate hope than reality, but what the hell. Bear with me:

read more

            Suppose for a moment that President Donald Trump, a narcissistic man of little intellect read more

Tomgram: Engelhardt, The White Ford Bronco Presidency

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

Big Brother Isn’t Watching You
You’re Watching Him!
By Tom Engelhardt

A record? Come on! Don’t minimize what’s happening. It’s far too unique, too unprecedented even to be classified as “historic.” Call it mega-historic, if you wish. Never from Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar to Soviet despot Joseph Stalin, from the Sun King Louis the XIV to President Ronald Reagan, read more

Thinking Beyond Exceptionalism

Excepted from Curing Exceptionalism: What’s wrong with how we think about the United States? What can we do about it? (April, 2018).

Try this experiment: Imagine that space aliens really come to earth and really have, as I think is very unlikely, developed the ability to travel to earth while simultaneously remaining so primitive as to violently attack the places they visit. In contrast to the space aliens, could you identify as an earthling to such an extent as to diminish your other senses of identity? “Earthlings — F— Yeah!” “We’re Number 1!” “Greatest Earthlings on Earth!” And can you hold that thought, read more