Articles by Mark Taylor

  By Michael Moore Michael Moore’s Facebook Page (8/31/17) There are some misleading stories about a “prediction” I supposedly made based on the interview I gave below. I’m not Nate Silver. Or the New York Times (Hillary Clinton has an 85% chance of winning! http://nyti.ms/2iIKJ9m). I don’t do predictions. I just need you to wake the fuck up and not get giddy every time a new Robert Mueller story breaks. If we don’t face the fact that he outsmarted us all and is more than capable of doing it again in 2020, then we’ll be facing 8 years of Trump in…

  Democracy Now! (8/30/17) The World Meteorological Organization on Tuesday announced that Hurricane Harvey’s devastation is linked to climate change. All past U.S. rainfall records have been shattered, and the devastating storm is expected to bring even more rainfall to Louisiana and Texas in the coming days. And yet, the corporate networks have avoided linking the record-breaking storm to climate change. We examine storm coverage with Naomi Klein, best-selling author of several books, including “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.” Link to Story and 10-Minute Video ***** Ex-NASA Scientist James Hansen: There is a Clear Link Between Climate Change…

  By Darren Samuelsohn Politico (8/20/17) Nearly 3,000 miles from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Washington offices, another investigation into President Donald Trump is underway. This one unfolds in the public libraries and coffee shops of San Francisco, where a self-employed 40-year-old named Geoff Andersen has worked since November for 16 hours a day, seven days a week, burning through nearly $45,000 in personal savings and donations from friends and family in pursuit of hidden truths about Trump’s rise to power. Andersen, a freelance Democratic opposition researcher who worked on President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign and is now between jobs, has downloaded…

  LOVE today’s cartoon!!!  Someone needs to make a bunch of these shirts and sell them. Sue Conard LaCrosse, WI Editor’s Reply: Thanks, Sue. All Commoner Call original cartoons are available for use by progressive groups for T-shirts, newsletters, posters and websites for free. – Mark L. Taylor.

  By Lauren Gambino The Guardian (8/27/17) At Fellowship Chapel in west Detroit, Bernie Sanders delivered a thundering battle cry for the progressive movement before a crowd of nearly 2,000 people, squeezed into wooden pews and crowded into an overflowing room. The town hall had the feeling of a revival meeting led by Sanders, who preached with the same urgency the message he delivered repeatedly on the 2016 presidential campaign trail: the system is rigged against the American people. But in Detroit he punctured the bleak prophecy with a glimmer of hope. “What this whole debate is about is what constitutes human…

Devil’s Tower National Monument in Wyoming was designated as the first national monument by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1906.   By Julia Conley Common Dreams (8/24/17) Environmental groups denounced the Interior Department’s recommendation to President Donald Trump on Thursday that he reduce the size of some of the country’s national monuments. While a number of outlets framed the story by reporting that Secretary Ryan Zinke was recommending against the elimination any monuments, a two-page summary (pdf) released by the Interior Department made clear his position that some of the country’s protected lands are too large. Trump ordered Zinke to review 27 monuments in April, declaring that President Barack…

By Jake Johnson Common Dreams (8/23/17) While much of the nation looked on in horror as President Donald Trump delivered a speech ripped “out of a psychopathology textbook” on Tuesday night in Arizona, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) headlined a town hall-style event in Detroit, Michigan on racial and economic justice that served as a marked contrast to Trump’s “unhinged” performance. Before Sanders approached the podium, Rev. Wendell Anthony of the Detroit Fellowship Chapel Church delivered a remarkable introduction that was quickly spread on social media. Sanders is “trying to take down the tributes to racism and division” while also “trying to…

  By Howard Fineman The HuffPost (8/16/17) WASHINGTON — Let’s be clear about what President Donald Trump was up to Tuesday during his press conference in Trump Tower, and what his longer-range plan is for surviving, if not prospering, in the White House for at least four years. Speaking publicly in the family fortress in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, he wasn’t trying to convince anyone of the facts. There could be no dispute about them if you saw, say, the Vice video of hideous neo-Nazis, KKK members, generic white supremacists and rancid anti-Semites in the streets carrying torches and chanting “Jews…

  By Thomas Frank The Guardian (8/10/17) At the end of July, the leadership of the Democratic party bestirred themselves from their comfortable Washington haunts and paid a visit to a small town in Virginia, where they assumed a populist guise and announced before the cameras of the world that they were regular folks just like you. The occasion for this performance was the launch of a Democratic party manifesto that bears the uninspiring name, A Better Deal. Its purpose, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer wrote in the New York Times, was to “show the country that we’re the party on the…

  By Juan Cole Informed Comment (8/14/17) Steve Bannon ran, and is still likely pulling the strings at, Breitbart, the “Stormfront” in a business suit with a skinny tie. Bannon once characterized it as enabling what he called the “alt right,” by which he meant a slightly more presentable version of the skinheads, KKK, bikers, Neo-Nazis and other far right fringe supremacist groups that might appeal to today’s youth, including the educated. Breitbart has been wildly successful, since conspiracy theories, race resentment, Islamophobia, misogyny and other base emotions have a visceral appeal. I would argue that the success of the…