A Strategically Timed ICC Arrest Warrant Request

On November 27, Karim Khan, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, announced that he is seeking an arrest warrant against Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the head of Myanmar’s military junta, for his role in the commission of crimes against humanity against his country’s Rohingya minority. This announcement comes at an awkward moment for American politicians of both parties who have been promising to impose sanctions on the ICC, its Prosecutor, its judges and their families as punishment for the ICC’s “outrageous” issuance of arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for their roles in the continuing atrocities in the occupied State of Palestine that the International Court of Justice has ruled evidence a “plausible” case of genocide. More

There’s No Upside to Trump

“Trump could surprise on the upside,” writes Edward Luce, who claims to know “what Trump most cares about.” Lacking intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the president-elect’s personal thoughts, us non-pundits are relegated to looking at other indicators. We can try to decipher Trump’s abysmal cabinet picks. “If Trump has nominated second-tier establishment types More

The Trumpist Bureau of Investigation?

I want the FBI to be disbanded.  Forever. I’ve wanted this to happen since 1970.  When the Senate hearings led by Franck Church revealed the extent of the FBI’s (and the CIA’s) infiltration of political and cultural organizations a couple years later, my hatred of the agency multiplied a hundredfold.  That being said, I don’t want the FBI to be replaced by a Donald Trump-run national police agency—a TBI, if you will. For those who don’t know and those who don’t remember, Richard Nixon tried to remake the FBI in his image back in the early 1970s.  He got very close to doing so.  According to what I’ve been able to parse over the years in my reading, conversation and other research, a big reason Nixon failed in turning the FBI into his own private police force was the presence of another powerful reactionary. That was the long time director of the Agency, J. Edgar Hoover, who only ended his directorship by dying. More

Going to Hell in a “Drill, Baby, Drill” Handbasket

Give him credit. As a start, for that first surprise victory in 2016. No, I didn’t fully get it at the time, but I kind of get it now (since, like the rest of us, I’ve lived through it all, including his close loss in 2020). Still, twice? Him? A convicted felon, no less! And yes, I do think italics More