MAY 12, 2025
Trump in an interview Friday with Meet the Press attributed his decision not to go ahead with a strike on Iran to concerns about proportionality. He said he asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff just before the strike was to have been set in motion about the likely Iranian casualties. They estimated 150. He said that since the Iranian had shot down an unmanned drone, that death toll seemed to him not Continue Reading...
The rising tensions between the Trump administration and Iran have the potential to roil the entire Middle East, and no country feels the heat more than Iraq, which has warm relations both with the US and Iran, as Egyptian journalist Islam Muhammad argues in a wideranging report. Iraqi nationalist and Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr made headlines earlier this week when he tweeted out that a US-Iran War would “finish off Iraq.” Al-Sadr, who Continue Reading...
Understanding “Wolff-ism”: Prof. Richard Wolff’s Take on Karl Marx in New Text The 2008 crisis of capitalism sparked and regenerated interest in alternatives to the capitalist system, which was on the verge of collapsing. This included revived interest in socialism, with one of the results being the propelling of an obscure leftwing academic into history’s headlights. With appearances on TV shows including Bill Moyers’ and Charlie Rose’s Continue Reading...
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Wednesday formed an electoral coalition with the extremist Otzma Yehudit(Jewish Power) Party, thus giving followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane a bigger role in Israel politics. Kahane, a major violent hate group leader, founded the Jewish Defense League, seen by the FBI as the most active and dangerous terrorist group in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He also founded the party Kach, Continue Reading...
Bureaucratic Brio: The Man Who Would Be Vice President - or Viceroy? Writer/director Adam McKay’s Vice, an all-star biographical movie about Dick Cheney is among Hollywood’s top 2018 political pictures. It’s utterly uncanny how Christian Bale completely disappears into his role as the former vice president, just as John C. Reilly does as Oliver Hardy in another biopic being released in America during the holiday season, Stan & Ollie. With Continue Reading...
The newly elected Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who represents Michigan’s 13th District, is seeking to take a delegation of congressional representatives to the Palestinian West Bank, which is militarily occupied by Israel and where some 600,000 Israeli squatters have usurped Palestinian land belonging to the nearly 3 million Palestinians living there (another nearly 2 million live in the Gaza Strip). Tlaib represents not only part of Detroit Continue Reading...
A distinguished diplomat who handled the evacuation of 176,000 Indians, narrates how Air India carried out this task. On August 2, 1990, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein decided to have a ‘picnic’ in Kuwait by sending in his army across the border. He had massed troops at the border for weeks, and on 25th July 1990, the US Ambassador April Glaspie encouraged him to have the picnic, wittingly or unwittingly, by declaring that her instructions Continue Reading...
Propagandistic Presidential Pomp and Pageantry: From Bier to Eternity On Christmas day Adam McKay’s Dick Cheney biopic Vice was released, with John Hillner (Law & Order) portraying George Bush Sr. After the ex-president’s Nov. 30 death, as accolades were heaped upon George Herbert Walker Bush even before his cadaver was cold I wondered who were they talking about? The effusive eulogizing reminded me of Ted Rall’s August 28 column headlined Continue Reading...
The Climate Summit at Kotwice, Poland, ended on a positive note, with the 195 countries present committing themselves to financing instruments in a quest to cut carbon dioxide emissions and keep global heating to 1.5 degrees C. (2.7 degrees F.). Given that so many countries are producing so much CO2, that goal may not be practical. The next best thing would be to stop heating at 2 degrees C. (3.6 degrees F.) Apparently one of the positive Continue Reading...
On 2nd August 1990, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein decided to have a ‘picnic’ in Kuwait by sending in his army across the border. He had massed troops at the border for weeks, and on 25th July 1990, the US Ambassador April Glaspie encouraged him to have the picnic, wittingly or unwittingly, by declaring that her instructions were to strengthen relations with Iraq; the US did not want to take any side in ‘intra-Arab’ disputes, a clear reference to Continue Reading...
The murder of Jamal Khashoggi, from what we know so far, is a goddamned nightmare. Lured to the Saudi embassy in Turkey, he was captured and tortured, brutally, by psychopaths under the direction of the leader of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince (and, you know, fuck you if in this day and age you're still getting to lead a country because some inbred jizzed you out) Mohammed bin Salman. His fingers were cut off with a bone saw while he was awake. Continue Reading...
According to the just-released grand jury report, in 1990, Bishop James Timlin of Scranton, Pennsylvania, was first made aware that a priest who had recently been transferred to his Diocese, Father Arthur Long, had admitted to having sex with underage girls in his parish in Harrisburg. Timlin was the bishop in the Scranton Diocese, which encompasses the entire northeast section of Pennsylvania, from 1984 to 2003. Prior to being the bishop, Continue Reading...
On 8 May 2018, US President Donald Trump, true to his style and ‘America First’ philosophy, walked out of the Iran nuclear deal, technically known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). A fortnight has elapsed and it would be pertinent to examine the geopolitical implications of Trump’s decision. The US’ Position By now it is reasonably clear why Trump withdrew from the deal. He has failed to provide any rational argument against Continue Reading...
Trump allegedly complained to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that after the 2015 nuclear deal, the Iranians “think they can do anything they want.” Presumably Trump was referring to Iran’s geopolitical reach in the Middle East, where it had gathered up allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. It is likely that Trump’s violation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the deal signed between Iran and the five permanent Continue Reading...
Trump on the campaign trail said many self-contradictory things about the Syrian civil war. He wanted to carpet bomb ISIL, which had a strip of territory in the far east of the country. He wanted to send in 30,000 US troops, he said at one point. Then at other times he argued that “we” should just “let Russia handle it.” Continue Reading...
