A blog about a criminal enterprise
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
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
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
By Mike Ferner
May 30, 2018
A national veterans’ organization is weighing in on this year’s Emmy awards with a full-page ad in Variety, saying Ken Burns and Lynne Novick’s “Vietnam War” series does not deserve a “Best Documentary” award.
VFD Emmy ad finalVeterans For Peace (VFP), headquartered in St. Louis, with 175 chapters in the U.S. and six overseas,
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,
“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
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Six years ago, in late May 2012, I read a New York Times piece by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will.” They reported that President Obama was then overseeing a “regular Tuesday counterterrorism meeting
Gail Davidson is a legal activist working for a better world through advocacy and education to enhance understanding of and compliance with, international human rights and humanitarian law. She is the founder and Executive Director of Lawyers Rights Watch Canada a volunteer-run committee of lawyers and other human rights defenders in Special Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council of the UN that promotes international human rights and the rule of law through advocacy,
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
When I was young, I often imagined myself as an American diplomat. Back in the early 1960s, it seemed like serving my country in such a role would be an honorable, even glorious, path to take. Can you believe that I ever thought such a thing in this twenty-first-century moment when diplomats by the hundreds
By Dave Lindorff
It’s long been an American conceit that the way you negotiate is to demand a surrender by your opponent, and then you hammer out the terms of that surrender.
Ir worked great in World War II after the Red Army chewed up Germany’s elite army and left the country with the choice of being overrun by the Soviets or surrendering at least part of the country to the