ALL ARTICLES

  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…

  By Darryl Fears The Washington Post (6/17/17) The Trump administration has ended a six-year-old ban on selling bottled water at some national parks that was aimed at easing plastic pollution and the huge amount of waste being recycled. In a statement that closely tracked the arguments of a campaign by the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA) in opposition to the ban, the National Park Service said the 2011 action under the Obama administration “removed the healthiest beverage choice at a variety of parks while still allowing sales of bottled sweetened drinks.” The move follows a review of the policy “in close consultation…

  By Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility EcoWatch (8/2/17) A 30-year U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) senior official left federal service Tuesday convinced that her agency is being steered in a disastrously wrong direction, according to her farewell message posted by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). She is an eyewitness to the wreckage wreaked by Administrator Scott Pruitt and his cadre of political appointees. Elizabeth “Betsy” Southerland has a Ph.D. in environmental science and engineering and has worked in both the private sector and state government. At EPA, she served in both the water and Superfund programs as a senior executive, managing first…

  By Jake Johnson Common Dreams (8/12/17) Corporate profits are up. Wages remain low. And, as always, the richest are angling for ever-lower tax rates. Only 0.1 percent of full-time workers earning the minimum wage can afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment in any state in the U.S., but judging by their tax agenda, the Republican Party and President Donald Trump appear to feel it is massive corporations and billionaires—not American workers—who need an income boost. Attempting to justify his push to give massive tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans and the largest corporations, Trump has repeatedly argued that businesses are being strangled by high…

By E.P. Milligan World Socialist Web Site (8/10/17) Drug overdose deaths in the United States are rising sharply, the National Center for Health Statistics reported Tuesday. For the year-long period ending January 2017, total US drug overdose deaths totaled 64,070, up 21 percent from 52,898 for the previous year. This is equivalent to 175 people dying every day from drug overdoses. Based on more comprehensive data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control, whose figures lag behind the social reality by about a year, more than 500,000 Americans have died of drug overdoses in the period between 2000 and 2015—roughly…

  By Caitlan Johnstone Medium (8/8/17) Political IQ test: What does it mean when CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and the President’s Twitter account all agree that a foreign state poses a suddenly increased threat to America? A) If they all agree it must be true! B) Well I dislike some of those outlets, but I trust one of them. C) The US intelligence community would never lie to us. D) Hmm… this sounds an awful lot like the leadup to Iraq? If you said anything but D, you are of course a fucking moron. The United States power establishment has an…

By Noor Al-Sabai The Raw Story (8/9/17) “How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?” The question was asked in 1973 by Harold Hering, an Air Force major studying to be a missileer, or one of the people who turns the keys that unlock the deadliest of missiles. The question, raised again by the Washington Post on Wednesday, remains as prescient now in light of President Donald Trump’s “fire and fury” threat against North Korea as it did then — when Hering rightfully questioned whether or not President Richard Nixon was, at…