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Graham and DeSantis Tried to Own But Got Owned

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You know what's darkly hilarious or perhaps hilariously dark or maybe not hilarious at all and just plain dark? I'd bet that Lindsey Graham and Ron DeSantis thought what they did this week was fucking awesome and that they'd show those no-good liberals what fucking hypocrites they are. Except that reality ended up punching them both in the dick for acting like dicks, and, yeah, that's pretty fucking funny. First, South Carolina Sen. Graham, Continue Reading...

Film Review: Three Thousand Years of Longing

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Impish: Still Dreaming of Genie My readers (Hiya Ma!) know I hate plot spoilers but the following is not only revealed within the first few minutes of Three Thousand Years of Longing, but is also the main premise of Australian director George Miller’s (the Mad Max franchise) new movie. In Longing, Alithea (British actress Tilda Swinton of The Beach, Snowpiercer, Doctor Strange) is a narratologist – a scholar who studies storytelling – Continue Reading...

Climate Emergency: Europe Parched, Farms Fallow, as Lakes and Rivers Dry up in worst Drought since time of Christ

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Europe is in the throes of a once-in-500 years severe drought that is making its rivers into shallow streams and its lakes into vanishing puddles. The mighty Rhine in Germany is so low that it may soon not be navigable. The biggest lake in Italy is fast disappearing. These are catastrophic events that beggar the imagination. The drought is deepening and is expected to spread to nearly half of the continent. Europe has a long history and has Continue Reading...

Book Review: An American Evangelical Christian Man’s Awakening to Palestine

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“This is all we ask. Go back and tell the truth.” The author of this memoir, Rev. Don Wagner, is a longtime friend. Back in the day, Rev. Wagner was based in Chicago, Illinois and I was in Youngstown, Ohio. We both were engaged in the same struggle for Palestine. Subsequently, when I relocated to Palestine, I would speak to the various eyewitness delegations he led to the Holy Land, or what he prefers to call the “unholy land” — which, he Continue Reading...

Did Trump try to Get VP Mike Pence Killed?

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The Jan. 6 Committee revealed on Thursday that Trump knew that the Capitol had been breached by his Oath Keeper and Proud Boy black shirts when he sent his tweet at 2:24 p.m. saying, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA Continue Reading...

MAKE LOVE, NOT BANS: Anti-Abortions Fanatics’ Real Enemy is Sex

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Sexual Politics In the weeks since Supreme Court Grand Inquisitor Justice Samuel Alito’s anti-choice screed was disclosed, amidst all of the mass protests, speechifying, pontificating, punditry, etc., I noticed that something essential to the abortion brouhaha was completely missing from what passes for public discourse in this country: That sexual intercourse for pleasure and intimacy is under attack. In our age of artificial insemination, Continue Reading...

America’s Mass Hysteria: Can We Please Talk About Crazy Motherfuckers Like They’re Crazy Motherfuckers?

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I've been trying to articulate for the last week this feeling of things spinning off their axis. I'm in the UK right now, a place I now end up spending about a month a year, and I was talking about politics with a young man from Northern Ireland. He had supported Brexit, yes, because he had believed the Conservatives' utter garbage about how much funding would go to the National Health Service. Now that Brexit is so obviously the Continue Reading...

Barbaric Israeli Police Attack on Christian Funeral for Slain US Reporter Shireen Abu Akleh Shocks World

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The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports that at least 33 mourners were injured by Israeli security forces who attacked the Christian funeral procession to a cathedral for the body of murdered American correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh on Friday. The actions of the Israeli security forces can only be explained by settler-colonial fear that the indigenous people will refuse to give up their identity and melt away. Frequent police attacks Continue Reading...

Film Review: Klondike

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Ukrainian Actress Presents Antiwar Cinematic Stunner at SEEfest   If it’s true, as General William Tecumseh Sherman reputedly observed during America’s Civil War, that “war is hell,” according to Kyiv-born Maryna Er Gorbach’s Klondike, the “hottest seat in hell” (to paraphrase Dante) seems reserved for those ensnared in the civil war in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region. One of the grimmest films I’ve ever seen, Klondike is so bleak in its Continue Reading...

Film Review: Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator

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Oh! Kolkata: Yogi Bare, Boo-Boos and Bikram Academy Award winning Australian filmmaker Eva Orner’s well-made documentary Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator is an 86-minute creepfest perfect for the #MeToo Movement and moment. This no-punches-pulled nonfiction film purports to chronicle the career, life, lies, and sexual abuse of Bikram Choudhury, the main ballyhooer of Bikram or “Hot Yoga” in America and beyond. The ornery Orner goes after Choudhury Continue Reading...

Israeli Police Raid Sacred al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan, Wound 158 Palestinians

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The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports that at dawn prayers on Friday Israeli security forces mounted an assault on the worshipers at the holy al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest site in the Muslim religion, in the midst of the Muslim Lent or fasting month, Ramadan. They injured some 158 and arrested 500 Palestinians. The assault began with tear gas volleys, after which the Israeli forces assaulted the worshipers. The attack Continue Reading...

Democrats Should Go on the Offensive By Celebrating Accomplishments

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A couple of things really stick in my craw from the last couple of years, and those are that we've been denied celebrating as a nation some pretty remarkable accomplishments. And while that denial is led by Republicans, quick to stomp any hints of optimism or hope like they're cockroaches, Democrats should have and still can embrace amazing things and turn it into a story that the nation is not failing. Rather the opposite. It offers a Continue Reading...

Best of Web

Trump, McConnell, Putin, and the Triumph of the Will to Power

At a critical moment in the 2016 presidential campaign, President Obama met with Republican congressional leaders and, after presenting them with evidence of Russian tampering, asked that they uniformly condemn it.  GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and others refused.  The evidence just wasn’t there.  But it was.  And many of the same lawmakers eagerly condemned Hillary Clinton’s perceived misdeed, as reported by the FBI.  So much for love of country.

Russia and the Threat to Liberal Democracy

Liberal democracy faces grave dangers, most significantly, perhaps, from rapacious capitalism that unremittingly concentrates wealth.  Putin is another threat.  After consolidating his own power in Russia, he has stepped up a campaign against liberalism abroad, first in Russia’s “near abroad” in Eastern Europe, and now the US.  Is Trump his latest trophy?

The Victory of ‘No’

For eight years, the GOP employed strategic obstructionism to stymie Obama’s mildly progressive agenda, even when his proposals, such as the Affordable Care Act or the stimulus, closely aligned with their own.  Putting country first?  Nope.  This was pure partisanship in the service of partisanship.  And it worked!

Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans

Is the so-called “liberal,” “elite” media really as cosseted and cloistered as its critics suggest?  Actually, yes.  Like the Democracy Party, the media – defined here as the mainstream variety – largely comprises well-educated, coastal types who have little in common (and often disdain) middle-America, working class whites.  Little wonder it has earned the latter’s ire.

Hillary Clinton and the Populist Revolt

What happens when the purported party of the working class abandons its proletarian roots, while the other major party pushes crazed conspiracy theories, paranoia, and racism as an obfuscatory tactic to conceal its plutocratic agenda?  A virulent populism that threatens the republic.  Whose to blame for Trump?  We all are.

In ‘Hitler,’ an Ascent From ‘Dunderhead’ to Demagogue

How did a clownish buffoon rise from obscurity to lead one of the world’s great civilizations that produced soaring art and culture?  Historians have been asking the question since the demise of the Third Reich.  Hitler confounds.  Here are some clues: cunning exploitation of nativist fears, exploitation of irresistible propaganda, and “bottomless mendacity.”  Found familiar.  It should.