Reiner was a liberal Democrat to the core. Blinded by party loyalty, he became a hardboiled Russiagater and offered excuses for many inexcusable acts by HRC and Biden. But he was more passionate than most of the soulless post-Clinton suits who have run the party for the last three decades. Reiner was funny and had a sense of irony about himself, which few self-righteous Hollywood liberals seem to possess. I sensed that he genuinely cared about the poor and the marginalized and knew the system was rotten at its core and needed change, even if the only change he could envision was so incremental it was barely noticeable and easily erased once the Berserkers took power.

The double-tap strikes are appalling and illegal, but Hegseth is merely following the bloody path Barack Obama blazed. Obama’s drone assassination team even had a name for wounded survivors they would target for a second kill strike: squirters. According to David Shedd, Obama’s former acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “We used double-taps all the time. You would get the initial signature off of a target that’s been hit and if you saw that they ‘squirted’ and were injured … you hit them again.” Shedd told Washington Post columnist Mark Thyssen: “There was often a second predator ready to go … that was fully expected to be used if you didn’t have a 100 percent coming out of the first hit — and maybe a third hit…It was done routinely.”

So it’s no surprise thatTrump did more than receive MBS with diplomatic niceties. He lavished praise on the smirking Prince with the eagerness if a supplicant, asserted his innocence with the fervency (if not articulateness) of a defense lawyer, throwing his own intelligence agencies under the bus, demeaned and ridiculed an American reporter for asking obvious and obligatory questions of the Prince and even went so far as to suggest that Khashoggi may have deserved to be killed on the orders of the man sitting across from him in the Oval Office. “Things happen,” Trump shrugged. 

After sweeping the elections last week, the Democrats agreed to a deal to end the shutdown that gave them almost nothing and could have been made weeks ago. It’s what they do. The Democrats weren’t going to “win” the shutdown, but they could’ve drawn blood from Trump and his cadre of cruelty in Congress. In the end, they surrendered and all of the bleeding was on their side, from largely self-inflicted wounds.

The bipartisan whitewashing of Dick Cheney is as much of a perversion of US history as Trump’s eliding any mention of the horrors of slavery, the internment of Japanese-Americans and the genocide against the indigenous population of the US from national parks and museums.

More than half of new ICE recruits failed an open-book test after taking a course on Immigration and the Fourth Amendment. This pervasive constitutional ignorance might seem like a grave disorder for a law enforcement agency, but under the current dispensation, it is likely a prerequisite for the position. The Trump administration doesn’t want its ICE agents hesitating to cuff a 6-year-old or tear gas a teacher trying to shield her student because it might violate some civil right or another. That would be wussy and woke.

We’re not afraid, we’re not trembling and our objective as journalists remains the same as it was in the 1990s when the first CounterPunch newsletter went to press: to question the received wisdom, call out political cant and cliches, expose injustices and follow the money wherever it leads and into whoever’s pockets it stuffs. As CounterPunch founder Ken Silverstein, still one of the best investigative journalists around, said: “We’re journalists, not ideologues. Everyone is fair game.”

Maria Greeley was on her way to work at the Beach Bar in Chicago, when she was accosted by three ICE agents. Fearing she might be targeted by ICE, Greeley, who is Latina, had her passport with her, proving she was an American citizen, born 44 years ago at the Masonic Hospital in Chicago. The Feds looked at Greeley’s passport and said it was fake because she didn’t “look like” her last name. Greeley explained that she was adopted by the Greeley family shortly after birth. “They said this [her passport] isn’t real, they kept telling me I’m lying, I’m a liar,” Maria Greeley told the Chicago Tribune. “I told them to look in the rest of my wallet, I have my credit cards, my insurance.” The agents still didn’t believe her and forced her hands behind her back and cuffed them together with zip ties. Then they interrogated her for more than an hour before releasing her, another American citizen subjected to federal cop abuse based solely on the color of her skin.

The fatal flaw in Donald Trump’s scheme to whitewash American history of its most depraved and embarrassing episodes is that his administration is committing new acts of barbarity and stupidity in real-time on an almost hourly basis. Consider the last week in Chicago and Portland.

When Ralph Nader campaigned on”cutting fat” from the Pentagon, he was referring to the budget, and big ticket weapons systems like SDI and the F-35, not the waistlines of generals.

I gave up long ago on the utility of psychoanalyzing Trump. His pathologies seem so all-encompassing and theatrical as to defy interpretation, even by anti-analysts like RD Laing and Thomas Szasz. But watching Trump in quick succession at the Kirk memorial, the Tylenol press conference and the UN General Assembly, he seemed like a personality in the midst of physical and mental breakdown. Not a crackup, so much as a kind of psychological entropy that is finally beginning to splinter a subject that it’s pawed and scratched the surface of for decades.

Many of those righteously condemning the rise of “political violence” have supported two years of genocidal violence in Gaza and recently celebrated when the President of the US released a snuff film of a US Navy drone strike that killed 11 people in a small boat off the coast of Venezuela in violation of international and US law, as well as that most mysterious of all laws, the Law of the Sea. Our society, already among the most violent in the world, has been saturated in official violence done in our name since 9/11. In the last quarter-century of the forever wars, hundreds of thousands have been killed and maimed. These daily slaughters, many if not most of them rationalized by politicians and the pundits, have done more to twist the psyche of Americans than ideologies, video games or serotonin uplifters. And the ubiquitous presence of high-powered, military weaponry has provided the means for these bomb-shattered minds to go off on full-auto in their own perverted missions of retribution and revenge.

There is no legal justification for Trump’s military strike on an alleged “drug boat” off the coast of Venezuela. The boat, a simple speedboat, posed no threat to the US Navy vessels. The little boat could have easily been interdicted, searched for drugs and its occupants detained if any were found. No proof was offered that it was carrying drugs or was associated with the Tren de Aragua “narco-terrorist organization.” In any event, drug trafficking is not a capital offense, even when it’s been proven. Most countries would consider this an act of terrorism and mass murder under international law. Indeed, such a strike is also prohibited under US law.

ack in April, Jesús Escalona Mújicas was on his way to his job at a construction site when he was pulled over by federal immigration officers and Texas police in a joint raid near Bryant, Texas. Escalona Mújicas, a 48-year-old native of Venezuela, was pressed against his car as his hands were bent behind his back and cuffed. He was taken to a neaby gas station where he was interrogated. He was then arrested and thrown in the immigration detention jail (aka, “Processing Center”) in Conroe, Texas. The officers who arrested him claimed to have a deportation order for Escalona Mújicas based on the Alien Enemies Act, which Trump had recently invoked to speed up deportations of alleged gang members from central and south America. An agent told him: “the President does not want to see Haitians, Nicaraguans, Cubans, or Venezuelans here.” Escalona Mújicas protested that he wasn’t a gang member and had a temporary work visa. But his denials were smugly dismissed by the arresting agents.

As a naive country kid from the glacier-smoothed farmlands of central Indiana, I arrived in DC in 1977, lived in the District through 1982 and commuted back there to work from Baltimore for another year. DC was a much rougher place and poorer, though more vibrant, city in the 70s and 80s than it is [...]

DC was a much rougher place and poorer, though more vibrant, city in the 70s and 80s than it is now that it’s been almost completely gentrified. I didn’t have a car, so I rode the Metro, took the bus, or walked everywhere. I went all over town at all hours, from Tenley Circle to Adams Morgan to Anacostia, often late at night going to clubs to hear bands, going to and from the libraries at Georgetown or Catholic because AU’s was so shitty, working at Blues Alley and a movie theater deep down Connecticut Avenue, and later giving talks and attending organizing meetings for the Freeze Campaign.

Just days after a federal appeals court upheld a ban on ICE using roving patrols and racial profiling to target immigrants, Trump’s secret police launched Operation Trojan Horse, a shock raid outside of a Home Dept in the Westlake area of Los Angeles. Posing as building contractors, ICE agents drove a yellow Penske van in front of a group of day laborers at 6:44 in the morning, asking in Spanish if any of them were looking for work. Then masked ICE agents, one of them wearing a cowboy hat, jumped out of the van and began grabbing people. In all, 16 men were arrested and taken into ICE custody in defiance of a federal appeals court.

This was the week the worms turned. Some of them, anyway: A super majority of Americans now oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza; Bari Weiss and Donald Trump admitted Palestinians are starving (if not that they are being starved or pointing the finger at who is starving them);  France, the UK and Canada announced they are ready to endorse Palestinian statehood next month at the UN; a majority of Senate Democrats voted to halt (offensive) weapons shipments to Israel; Israel’s two leading human rights groups, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, finally concluded that Israel is committing genocide; Zohran Mamdani is leading the polls among Jewish voters in the NYC mayoral race; Barack Obama finally said something, though exactly what isn’t quite clear; Obama’s former fixer and hatchet man Rahm Emanuel put the blame “on Israel’s doorstep…where it belongs;” and the New York Times printed a column by acclaimed Holocaust scholar Omar Bartov explaining why Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

And why would the Israelis aggressively pursue holding the killers to account? The settlers are agents of the regime. Indeed, they are the leading edge, the shock forces, if you will, for the Netanyahu government’s evolving plan to annex the West Bank. These marauding gangs function more like paramilitaries than ad hoc mobs. They’ve been armed to the teeth by Netanyahu’s Kahanist National Security Minister Itamar Itamar Ben-Gvir with more than 120,000 weapons since October 7, 2023, many of them supplied by the US. Some of these armed settlers have now been deputized into police units. But they’re not there to keep law and order, but to sow chaos. The intent is to terrorize people into abandoning their fields, their villages and their homes.

George Retes was pulled over by ICE as he was driving near the violent raid on farm workers outside of Camarillo last Thursday. The ICE agents broke the windows of his car and pepper sprayed him, before taking him into custody. Retes is an American citizen and disabled US Army Veteran. He was held in federal lockup for four days , during which time his family and lawyer had no way of contacting him to find out where he was or inquire about his physical condition. He was released without charges on Sunday night. Is this what Thomas Homan meant when he told FoxNews that ICE can stop people based on their skin-color and “briefly” detain them without a warrant or probably cause until ICE is satisfied they’re American citizens?

While offering his “thoughts and prayers” for the families of those drowned in the Texas floods, JD Vance referred to the killer torrents that swept away more than 100 people, including dozens of children, as “an incomprehensible tragedy.”

“Incomprehensible?” Only if you ignore the fact that the Girls Camp was allowed to be built and continue operating in one of the most flood-prone valleys in the US, that the climate crisis is making these floods much more frequent and then in order to give more tax breaks to billionaires you gutted the staff of the National Weather Service that could have given these vulnerable children warning of the imminent danger that would claim their lives …If you don’t ignore these facts, this tragedy was both entirely predictable and avoidable.

+ Trump mega-bombed a mountain in Iran and called it peace. Unfortunately, he didn’t bomb what was beneath the mountain. If anything. If the objective was to destroy Iran’s nuclear research facilities, Trump’s Operation Midnight Hammer was a dud. The bombs exploded, craters were left behind, but Iran’s nuclear facilities were mainly left in tact, damaged but not crippled and certainly not, in Trump’s word, “obliterated.”

Using Israel’s logic for attacking Iran (to protect itself from (non-existent) Iranian nuclear weapons), every country in the Middle East (and beyond) would be justified in attacking Israel and destroying its (still undeclared) arsenal of 90 nuclear warheads. Trump’s assertion that if Iran developed a nuclear weapon, it would automatically use it against Tel Aviv, is preposterous, since Iran doesn’t want to be annihilated and surely would be  if it did so. Israel, on the other hand, could nuke Iran and get away with it, as the US did Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The last time a President deployed the National Guard to a state over the objections of the governor was in 1965, when LBJ sent them to protect Civil Rights marchers in Selma in defiance of Alabama Governor George Wallace. Now they’re being sent by Trump to California to crack down ON civil rights protesters.

Back in March, the Trump administration bragged about raiding a big Tren de Aragua gathering” in the Texas hill country outside of Austin. Forty-five people were taken into custody, including children. But they’ve said little about the big bust since. There’s a good reason:  the gathering wasn’t a meeting of gang leaders, but a birthday party for a five-year-old boy. None of the people taken into custody by ICE had a criminal record. None of those arrested have been charged with a crime in the two months since their detention.

White genocide? There were 27,621 murders in South Africa in 2023, more than 80 percent of them young, black males, who were poor or unemployed. During that same year, there were a total of 49 people (both white and black) killed on farms. For context, Israeli forces have killed more than 50 Palestinians every DAY in Gaza for the last 19 months. The population of South Africa is 63.1 million. Population of Gaza (pre-October 2023): 2.1 million.

Trump, ever in search of sadistic pleasures, wants his own CECOT-like prison to intern what he calls America’s “most vicious and violent criminals.” After prowling Alcatraz’s dark corridors, where men spent years in solitary confinement, in cramped cells that would turn anyone into a claustrophobic, not allowed to speak to each other or communicate with the outside world, you can see why this haunted rock with its chill history of retribution and psychological torture appeals to Trump’s debased instincts.

As a parable from the past to help us come to grips with our perilous present, you could do worse than screen Storm Warning, the 1951 noir that may be the most unlikely Klan movie ever made. It features Doris Day as the pregnant young wife who works in a bowling alley that just happens to serve as the local Klavern, but is clueless about everything going on around her; Ginger Rogers as her fashion model sibling who drops in for an unnaounced visit to check on little sister and exposes DD’s husband as a member of the KKK; and Ronald Reagan as the smalltown prosecutor who ends up pursuing the Klan for lynching a…reporter! Reagan and Rogers were two of Hollywood’s most prominent right-wingers. In fact, the film was shot during the time when Reagan, as president of SAG, was secretly snitching out members of the actors’ union he led to the Feds as suspected Reds. The theme of the Storm Warning isn’t that the KKK is racist or hates Jews (those details are taken as a given), but that it is…corrupt. A great film if you’re in the right state of mind. I watched it under the influence of a bottle of Côte du Rhone and Oregon’s most profitable agricultural product…You can find it on TCM and Criterion.

The problem with writing about Gaza is that words can’t explain what’s happening in Gaza. Neither can images, even the most gut-wrenching and heartbreaking. Because what needs to be explained is the inexplicable. What needs to be explicated is the silence in the face of horror. Israel has been brazenly upfront about its plans to […]

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America finally got its Pope, but not the reactionary, the Opus Dei wing was furiously lobbying for. And not an anti-abortion zealot like Cardinal Dolan, either. (Though his views on homosexuality and gender appear to be more orthodox than his predecessor’s.)  Instead, the Vatican’s smokestack spewed white in honor of Robert Prevost, a Chicagoan, whose attitude, at least, seems that of a Southsider (Indeed, the new Pope’s brother told WGN that Leo is a White Sox fan! They certainly need all the Divine intervention they can get.). For years, Prevost served as the head of the Augustinian Order, whose members, like the Franciscans, are instructed to lead simple lives and devote themselves to the ministration of the poor.

+ What if the remarkable string of federal court decisions against Trump’s policies (several rendered by his own appointees) isn’t evidence of an inept, blundering executive, but the intended result, where in the ultimate goal isn’t just to execute mass deportations, but to consolidate executive power by villifying and humiliating the federal judiciary as an impediment to the popular will. Indeed, this has long been the strategy advocated for years by Trump’s malevolent amanuensis Stephen Miller. 

American citizens are being routinely caught in Trump’s deportation dragnet, detained, jailed, and threatened with deportation, even a four-year-old with cancer and a pregnant mother who would have given birth to an American citizen. When ICE’s “mistakes” are revealed, usually through the presentation of a birth certificate days after the false arrest, the typical response has been to blame the victims. That’s if they haven’t already been deported. 

On the day Pope Francis released his encyclical on the fate of the Earth, I was struggling to climb a near vertical cliff on the Parajito Plateau of northern New Mexico. My fingers gripped tightly to handholds notched into the rocks hundreds of years ago by Ancestral Puebloans, the anodyne phrase now used by modern anthropologists to describe the people once known as the Anasazi. The day was a scorcher and the volcanic rocks were so hot they blistered my hands and knees. Even my guide, Elijah, a young member of the Santa Clara Pueblo, confessed that the heat radiating off the basalt had made him feel faint, although perhaps he was simply trying to make me feel less like a weather wimp.

Trump dreams of his own Kafkaesque penal colony, a place where he can ship the accused without the trouble of a trial, a place where the imprisoned have no chance to defend themselves and, in fact, may not know why they are condemned or how they can find their way out, if there is a way out. Trump’s Devil’s Island is the death-haunted country of El Salvador. If Trump is the crude Commandant, Nayib Buekele is his dutiful Officer, eager to perform any act of depravity to please his superior…for a price ($20,000 a person). The Travelers have been sent away from this prison state, denied any inspection of its torture chambers.