PBS SERIES, “THE VIETNAM WAR,” RECEIVES EMMY NOMINATION. SHOULD IT?

By Doug Rawlings

July 15, 2018

The recently announced Emmy nominations have generated new interest in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s 10-part documentary, “The Vietnam War,” nominated for an Emmy based on Episode 8, (April 1969 – May 1970), The History Of The World.

Vietnam veteran Doug Rawlings was in the Central Highlands with the 7/15th Army artillery that year and was later a founder of Veterans For Peace.

As each nightly episode of Burns/Novick series aired last fall, he wrote his read more

Undermining Trump-Putin summit means promoting war: Peace is a Good Thing, Whoever Manages to Achieve It

By Dave Lindorff

Timing isn’t everything, but in politics it’s important, and the indictment of 12 Russian intelligence for allegedly being behind the supposed hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 in an alleged effort to skew the election in favor of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, announced by Mueller “Russiagate” probe overseer and Associate US Attorney General Rod Jay Rosenstein just before President Trump’s planned summit read more

The Limits of Empathy

Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy was bound to be either advocacy for cruelty and sadism, or a horribly misguided attempt to improve the world, or false advertising (it would turn out he’s only against the most narrowly or bizarrely defined concept of empathy), or genuinely interesting. It turns out to be a combination of the last two, plus a third part made up of numerous lengthy but tangentially related topics — some of them also interesting.

The book’s subtitle is “The Case for Rational read more

Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Trump’s War on Black Jocks

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

Never forget it: Donald Trump rode birtherism like a surfboard into the White House. He first played the birther card back in 2011 (“I’m starting to think that [Obama] was not born here”), and the next year cited “an extremely credible source” that Obama’s birth certificate read more

Talk Nation Radio: Francesco Duina on Why Poor People in the U.S. Believe Better-Off Countries Are Horrible Places

Francesco Duina is the author of Broke and Patriotic: Why Poor Americans Love Their Country.

Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.

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Past Talk Nation Radio shows are all available free read more

Tomgram: Ariel Dorfman, The Cages of the Trump Era (That We Don’t See)

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

recent study of insect life in protected nature reserves in Germany got the most modest attention in our busy Trumpian world. In the last 27 years, however, researchers found that flying insect populations there had dropped 76% seasonally and 82% in mid-summer (when insect numbers are read more

Alan Dershowitz Is Not the Only One Who Gets Impeachment Bassackwards

The eternal question of U.S. politics rears its ugly ass again: “Why in the hell does anyone ever listen to Alan Dershowitz?”

No court can overturn a Congressional impeachment and conviction. Will somebody at Fox and CNN page the nearest genocidal torture-defending lawyer, who is either Alan Dershowitz or someone joining him on a search for the real O.J. Simpson killer at a five-star restaurant for lunch today, and get Dershowitz a copy of the United States Constitution?

The Constitution gives read more

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Overdosing in Twenty-First-Century America

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

America’s Addictions
Opioids, Donald Trump, and War
By Tom Engelhardt

When you think of addiction in America today, one thing comes to mind: the opioid epidemic. And it should. It’s serious. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, almost 64,000 Americans died of opioid read more

They Went to Jail for Justice

C.J. Hinke has produced probably the best collection I’ve read of writings by and about conscientious objectors and war refusers behind bars. It’s called Free Radicals: War Resisters in Prison.

The book is a bit of a time capsule, somewhat along the lines of Daniel Ellsberg’s recent book revealing the substance of the other half of the Pentagon Papers decades later. In fact, Hinke actually found this manuscript, which he had begun in 1966 and lost a couple of years later in the read more

Has Democratic Socialism a Future in American Politics?

Recently, when 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an obscure, upfront democratic socialist from the Bronx, easily defeated one of the most powerful U.S. Congressmen in the Democratic primary, the story became an overnight sensation.  How, the pundits wondered, could this upset have occurred?

Actually, it shouldn’t have been a total surprise for, in recent years, democratic socialism has been making a remarkable comeback in American life.  Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist U.S. Senator read more