By Lee Moran HuffPost (6/2/17) Salvation sometimes comes from the most unlikeliest of sources. An African-American church in Greenville, South Carolina, is now able to fund one of its projects — thanks to an anonymous $2,000 donation from someone who said they used to be a “terrible racist.” The mystery person also left a letter of apology with the two $1,000 post office money orders in the Nicholtown Presbyterian Church’s mail box on May 13. “First, I am white and used to be a terrible racist,” the unidentified donor wrote. “Thanks to Jesus and the Holy Spirit, acting through the Presbyterian…

  By John Pilger Counter Punch (5/31/17) The unsayable in Britain’s general election campaign is this. The causes of the Manchester atrocity, in which 22 mostly young people were murdered by a jihadist, are being suppressed to protect the secrets of British foreign policy. Critical questions – such as why the security service MI5 maintained terrorist “assets” in Manchester and why the government did not warn the public of the threat in their midst – remain unanswered, deflected by the promise of an internal “review”. The alleged suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, was part of an extremist group, the Libyan Islamic…

Bob Wick, BLM/Flickr   By Colin Dwyer & Kirk Siegler NPR (4/28/17) President Trump has ordered the Department of the Interior to review all designations of national monuments greater than 100,000 acres created since 1996. That executive order, which he signed Wednesday, places at least 20 — and as many as 40 — monuments in the government’s sights. The areas now under review span a vast range of landscapes — from arid deserts to frozen mountain peaks, from striking craggy vistas to teeming underwater playgrounds. And, though these monuments were all established roughly in the past two decades, they all…

  By Marilyn Katz In These Times (5/26/17) The daily revelations of the entanglement of Trump’s entourage have Republicans squirming and Democrats salivating at the smell of blood in the water. Former boogeymen like the CIA and the FBI have suddenly become heroes to liberals. After years of relative quietude, Russia has emerged once again as the evil empire, as if we were living in the height of the Cold War. Even progressives have not been immune, with thoughtful In These Times writers like Kate Aronoff and Jeff Alson spending their considerable brain power on weighing the danger, in the…

  By Andrea Germanos Common Dreams (5/29/17) The Pentagon said last week that there were “no credible indications of civilian casualties” from the latest U.S. Navy SEALs raid on a village in Yemen. Yet new reporting by The Intercept, citing eyewitness accounts, offers more evidence to contradict the military’s claim. Residents of the village in Mareb province said that there were in fact 10 civilians killed and wounded, including a 15-year old child who was trying to flee a barrage of firing from Apache helicopters. “My little brother Abdullah ran for his life with the other women and children. They…

By Matt Taibbi Rolling Stone (5/26/17) The story of Greg Gianforte, a fiend who just wiped out a Democrat in a congressional race about ten minutes after being charged with assaulting a reporter, is déjà vu all over again. How low do you have to sink to lose an election in this country? Republicans have been trying to answer that question for years. But they’ve been unable to find out, because Democrats somehow keep failing to beat them. There is now a sizable list of election results involving Republican candidates who survived seemingly unsurvivable scandals to win higher office. The…

  By Ralph Nader Nader.org  (5/16/17) All over America, school children are completing another academic year before their summer vacation. This invites the questions, what did they learn and what did they do with what they learned? I’m not talking about their test scores, nor the latest fads in rebranding education, like the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) curriculum that de-emphasizes the first two thirds of the old mantra – reading, writing and arithmetic. Rather, I am questioning what they learned about their real-world surroundings, about preparing themselves for life as citizens, workers, consumers, taxpayers, voters and members of…

  Progressives claim they are against the wars and all the militarism. OK, but then why support an authoritarian control over the issuance of the thing called money? The sovereign ‘authority’ to spend and then tax is a trap by which The People are ensnared into militarism they do not want. An ancient strategy called out by David Graeber in his book “Debt: The First 5000 Years.” Simple plan really – government declares its supreme authority to issue currency and first spends it into existence on the military. Then the self proclaimed authoritarian government (same self-declared nonsense as the Divine…

  By Kate Aronoff In These Times (5/12/17) The last few days have been a bit of a whirlwind, politically speaking. Most of it has to do with the onslaught of chaos that followed Donald Trump’s abrupt firing of FBI Director James Comey—a move political scientists agree is off the spectrum of normalcy in the history of the American presidency. Before his termination, Comey was leading an investigation into the Trump team’s alleged ties to the Russian government. Keith Ellison, deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee, has said “we are witnessing a constitutional crisis.” Calls for impeachment are in…

  By Neal Gabler Bill Moyers & Company (5/17/17) “Our Constitution works.” So declared newly installed President Gerald Ford in 1974 after Richard Nixon’s resignation. “Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men.” Oh glory be! All’s well that ends well. That has been the conventional wisdom ever since. Nixon was checked by checks and balanced by balances. The republic was saved, proving, in the words not only of Ford but of just about everyone, that the system does indeed work. Except for one thing: It didn’t. In fact, the real lesson of Watergate is not…