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Soon, Texas college professors and students will be able to carry concealed handguns on campus. Does this make you feel safer?
Here’s the story, as reported by the Associated Press and carried in the San Francisco Chronicle (a city whose Mayor, George Moscone, was killed by another elected official with a registered gun).
On February 15, President Obama bestowed the Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest award, to a group of people which includes former president George H.W. Bush. Having spent five years researching the elder Bush and discovering a staggering array of secrets to the man’s life—none of them favorable, I was curious why Obama gave Bush the medal.
Anyone who still wonders why the Bush administration invaded Iraq would do well to become familiar with an institution whose existence few Americans are aware of: the American University of Iraq-Sulaimaniya.
Located in Kurdistan, at the nexus of northern Iraq’s border with Iran and Turkey, AUI-S opened its doors in 2007. At the time, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times wrote about it with the sort of wide-eyed enthusiasm that had generally accompanied the invasion itself four years before. “Imagine for a moment if one outcome of the U.S. invasion of Iraq had been the creation of an American University of Iraq…Imagine if we had created an island of decency in Iraq…Well, stop imagining.”
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With all the attention on crowds of ordinary people rising up and asserting themselves against corruption and self-dealing by an oligarchy, we’re missing what the oligarchs are doing right at home. Take, for example, the activities of one of our biggest banks, JPMorgan Chase. Newly released documents show that high officials of the bank knew […]
In Donald Rumsfeld’s new book, Known and Unknown, out February 8, Rumsfeld offers an account of George W. Bush’s early interest in Iraq. This was just days after the 9/11 attacks. There were no apparent reasons for Bush to focus on Iraq, instead of on the actual perpetrators of the attacks. Here’s the Rumsfeld version […]
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Book By John Loftus America’s Nazi Secret is not what you’d call extremely reader-friendly material. Sometimes it feels like a chore to read it. But wow—does it ever provide powerful insight into the “deep politics” of US policy. Born of the Boston Irish, John Loftus never imagined that he would end up tracking down Byelorussian […]
With news reports mostly emphasizing the Israeli government’s wariness about events in Egypt, here’s an interesting development: It took the Arab-run news outlet, Al Jazeera, to run a piece about Jews being supportive of the Egyptian people’s self-determination. Writes Rabbi Michael Lerner: Ever since the victory over the dictator of Tunisia and the subsequent uprising […]
Bet you haven’t heard how Iraqi agriculture has been destroyed since the invasion—and how US agribusiness benefits. That’s a huge story, and one you won’t see in the corporate-owned US media. It’s a sad story, a tragedy, something that provides infinite perspective on the purposes and consequences of unnecessary war, and begins to explain why […]
Here’s an ominous development that is likely to pass almost unnoticed: a congressman requesting that the federal government identify to him everyone who has made a request under the Freedom of Information Act. The requester is Darrell Issa, the new head of the House Oversight Committee. He of course paints his initiative in benign terms—he […]
Events keep on underlining the gap between the rhetoric and the reality. Nowhere is this more true than with the disparity between the way we talk about our soldiers and their service and the way they are actually treated. (And if we become indignant about this, we might also get a little indignant about the […]
During the president’s speech, I kept my eyes and ears peeled for anything that a journalist might want to pursue. Here are some random thoughts: Obama and Congress paid tribute to Gabby Giffords, on the mend from the massacre in Tucson—but Obama said not a word about the explosion of guns into nearly every corner […]