No one can pinpoint precisely when the US war on Iraq began, but certainly dates back at least to 1962 when the CIA began plotting the overthrow of Abd al-Karim Qasim (who was executed in early 1963). And, of course, no one can predict when, if ever, the war on Iraq will come to an end. But it’s became the duty of each American president since JFK to declare the Iraq war over, then expand it…

There can be no doubt that Ham, the first chimpanzee in space, would have made a more evocative and intelligent description of his suborbital flight than the vapid mutterings of Bezos, who didn’t even have the sense to hire a professional peddler of pomp, like Jon Meacham, to script a few uplifting lines.

The worst thing the Cubans ever did to the US was to export the island’s most reactionary criminal element to south Florida, where they’ve dominated the economic and political scene for the last 60 years, using the same corrupt practices that got them chased out of Havana. And they’ll probably be paying price for this island cleaning until the Atlantic reclaims Miami.

On almost every issue that matters, including the future of life on the planet, the US government, if not the entire US culture, has become a real time case study of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, where the more incompetent it becomes, the less able it is to realize that what it’s doing isn’t working. The less you know, the less you know what you don’t know.

The “heat dome” shouldn’t have caught any of use by surprise. The new normal is yesterday’s abnormal. The surprises and anomalies come and go, but only in one direction. The hotter they come, the hotter the records fall. It’s time to stop calling the PNW heat wave “unprecedented” and start calling it the precedent for a future that has already arrived.

When Bill Clinton and Dick Morris perfected triangulation politics, the strategy was to work with the GOP to strangle progressive policies and advance a neoliberal agenda. Biden’s strategy takes this one step further and relies on Democrats to play the role of the 90s GOP politicians, many of whom were to the left of Sinema and Manchin.

In reading the transcripts from the post-summit press conferences, nearly every question from the US media was an attempt to goad Biden into making even more belligerent comments about Russia and, once FoxNews got the microphone, China, than he was already inclined to do. The press hasn’t changed all that much since the days of Hearst. In fact it’s probably worse, since there was still a muckraking tradition, even in Hearst’s papers, and the beat reporters themselves were largely working class then. If the administration shows any reluctance to escalate a confrontation, then the media is more than willing to light a match for them and then hide in the green room at CNN as it all goes up in flames.

Some politicians spend most of their careers reinventing themselves, trying to stay within the slipstream of current trends, never out front, never too far beyond. But that’s not Joe Manchin. His political identity has always been pretty transparent to those who care to look. Manchin’s not a complex operator.  Frankly, he’s just a hack and apparently is proud to be one. He’s spent most of his political life doing the bidding of coal companies and Big Pharma. His conflicts of interests are so obvious that he almost gloats about them. For Manchin, such critiques are proof that he’s doing what he came to Washington to do: serve his financial backers.

As an orator, Biden has never been known for his clarity. This can often seem like an endearing quirk of his perpetually twisted-tongue. But it’s also strategic. It serves him to be opaque about where he really stands on policies, from the US role in Afghanistan to student debt relief. But there are a few occasions when Biden is crystal clear and direct, when you can take his words to the bank and cash them in. Let us go back, then, to the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan, whose Bemelmans Bar is now bereft of the squeaks and honks of Woody Allen’s clarinet. During the heat of the 2019 primary campaign, Biden huddled with some of the richest people in New York City to assure them he would guard their interests.

It’s been said many times but unfortunately can’t be said often enough that the conflation of criticism of Israeli atrocities with anti-semitism is a deliberate tactic even though it demeans the toxicity of real anti-semitism. You almost get the sense that if anti-semitism didn’t exist, it would serve Israel’s strategic interest to bomb it into being, as a kind of permanent shield against popular outrage over its human rights crimes.

To describe what’s happening in Gaza as a “war” requires a suspension of belief in the concept of proportionality. The battle of Borodino was part of a “war.” These defenseless attacks on civilian homes and buildings are an escalation of Israel’s normal house clearing, using drones and cruise missiles instead of bulldozers.

There’s a theory that Israel controls US politics, that the most powerful war-making state the world has ever known is a mere puppet of Israel, institutionally incapable of asserting its own agenda in the Middle East. This is a convenient myth for both parties, since it makes Israel seem more powerful than it is and it tends to exculpate the US from direct complicity in ergregious human rights abuses. But in fact the US finances Israel. It is dependent on us. Its crimes are ours. We paid for them.

My number had finally been called. Well, texted. No one calls anymore, except sexy robotic voices trying to sell me extended warranties for my car and electric toothbrush. On Monday, I was scheduled for my second dose of Pfizer’s COVID elixir, a strange brew which one friend pungently described as a mixture of germs, animal parts, formaldehyde and pus. Yum. My appointment with destiny: High noon at the convention center in Portland, shrouded in tear gas or not. My only choice: right arm or left.

It’s only been 100 days and the country already seems numb, insensate to the widening fractures beneath its feet. In a land without outrage, you can get away with almost anything.

I’ve watched all of the footage of George Floyd’s murder. I’ve seen the crime from every angle. From body cameras and cellphones. I’ve looked at hundreds of still photos. I’ve listened to the audio dozens of times. Still, I cringe, horrified by the scene taking place before my eyes, even though I know how it will end, know every twitch of Floyd’s body, hear every desperate plea, each gasp for air.

Last Saturday morning, I took off early for the high desert in search of prairie falcons, wildflowers and rock art. It had been a gray, drizzly week in the Willamette Valley and I craved sun. I crossed the Columbia on the Bridge of the Gods, then took Highway 14, which hugs the river tightly, too [...]

I spent a few days last week at the mouth of the Columbia River, talking with members of the Chinook tribal people, whose ties to these tidal flats, rivers and coastal rainforests date back at least five thousand years. Probably more. Unlike the Chinook people on the south side of the Columbia, the those on the north never signed a treaty with the US government. Never ceded away any of their land or their fishing rights and harvesting rights. So in 1954, the US government simply terminated them as a “tribe” and all of their legal rights under US law.

The clock had been ticking since December, when I narrowly managed to evade jury duty, as the pandemic was spiking. I wouldn’t say our county is run by Covid deniers. But you can’t say it’s run by epidemiologists, either. The daily injustices at the courthouse must go on, killer virus be damned. My reprieve, however, [...]

I first encountered Ishmael Reed in the mid-70s in a humid attic in Broad Ripple, the boho enclave of Indianapolis. (Or what passes for the demimonde in the Crossroads of America, any way.) I was carving my way through Thomas Pynchon’s rock opera Gravity’s Rainbow for the first time and stopped for breath on page 588 in the middle of a dizzying riff on the Masons, and the ever-expanding web of conspiracies surrounding their covert rites. Here the Master gave a rare parenthetical nod to a living writer. “(Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you’ll ever find here.)”

The ravages of COVID and the narrow victories in the elections gave the Democrats a once in a generation chance to do something big without having to barter for the votes of grifter Republicans. Instead, the Democrats ended up negotiating amongst themselves in a strange dance of downward harmonization, where every intra-party compromise resulted in those who needed the most relief ending up with less and less. In the end, Biden, Schumer and Pelosi settled for a hefty spending package (bigger than most but similar in kind to past bills) that doled out $1.9 trillion across the political spectrum, but did little or nothing to address the system rot that got us here.

+ There were many reasons to vote against Trump, starting with the fact that he was the incumbent running for reelection. All incumbent presidents should be voted against as matter of principle, because they almost certainly started committing war crimes within weeks of taking office, a truism Biden has now reconfirmed with his bombing of [...]

We’d been without electricity, heat, internet and cell service since Friday, when Oregon City was encased in three inches of ice. The power returned intermittently on Wednesday morning, with the internet and cell service lagging behind. The news of the world had largely passed us by for five day. No big loss there. I was pretty confident that things would continue to fall apart in entirely predictable ways. The great, irreplaceable loss was hearing via Ralph Nader that my writing colleague and traveling companion, James Ridgeway, had died, while we were isolated in the dark chill.

The US Senate is one of the few juries in America where the presumption of innocence is actually institutionalized, to the point where many of the jurors have publicly announced their intention to acquit before the trial even began. Contrast with this with death penalty cases, where citizens who have a moral or religious objection to the death penalty can be automatically evicted from the jury pool. If all trials where conducted according to senate rules, we’d be much closer to decarcerating America.

+ As the Biden administration announced its intention to leave in place Trump’s border rules “for now,” it might be worth recalling when Biden’s campaign manager derisively quipped that they didn’t see Hispanics as part of their “path to victory.” + 5500 children were separated at the border in the last four years, at least 628 of them [...]

In the end, there was only one antiwar vote against Tony Blinken, whose fingerprints have been on nearly every US war from Iraq to Yemen, in the Senate. But not by Bernie or Warren or Merkley or Hirono…but Rand Paul. If you’re unwilling to object to the people who instigated wars you claim to have opposed, how can any of us expect you to stand up against wars they will start now that they are enshrined with even more power? Apparently, Bernie has reverted to his default position in the Clinton years, when he endorsed the overthrow of Saddam and the bombing of Serbia.

It’s healthy for a culture to celebrate the fall of its tyrants, even petty ones like Trump, particularly when they’re evicted by popular action, however contrived and constrained the mechanisms compelling their removal are. In the end, Trump limped out of DC exposed, humiliated and impotent, and back to the rising swamps of south Florida with process servers hot on his trail. Negation is a powerful, if, alas, all-too temporary, political aphrodisiac. Enjoy the buzz while it lasts, soon the thrill will be gone.

I fully support the right of the People to overthrow their own government. I draw the line at the government currently in power overthrowing the next government before it takes office, thus denying the People the privilege to overthrow it when it, inevitably, betrays them.

In order to understand the sometimes perplexing nuances of the US political economy, you first have to realize that the people who manage it believe as an article of faith that the poor have too much money and the rich not enough.

Joe Biden is by no means a smooth politician, but over the course of five decades in office he has mastered the art of the political bait-and-switch, a sleight of hand which has come to define the operating profile of so many Democratic bosses in the age of neoliberalism. 

Under Biden we’re going to experience four years (if he lasts that long) of negative creep, a steady recrudescence of the same policies–economic, social, environmental and military–which led us to into the very quagmire where nearly all of us are now inexorably sinking.

One of the most useful things about Obama’s memoir is that he reminds who some of the people now being recycled into the Biden administration really are. John Kerry, for example, who Obama describes as working assiduously to convince greens to “offer up concessions on subsidies for nuclear power and the opening of addition US coastlines to offshore oil drilled.” Obama writes this with gratitude and admiration, naturally, and was probably all the recommendation Biden need to tap Kerry as his “climate czar.”

So we have the same “originalists” who used to argue that the “Constitution isn’t a suicide pact” to justify torture, rendition and extrajudicial killings have now ruled that the Constitution is a murder-suicide pact when it comes to religious services during a killer pandemic.

Trump’s right, the electoral system is rigged, but not for the reasons he alleges. The system isn’t rigged to pick winners, but losers. The system is geared to preserve a certain class of political actors and keep out any rebellious interlopers. This doesn’t happen through the programing of voting machines or the stuffing of mail-in bailouts, through ballot harvesting or graveyard voters. The real rigging of the system is entirely (or almost entirely) legal: through PACs, dark money, gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, onerous ballot status requirements, the electoral college, extreme constraints on third and independent parties. Still, if Trump can bring further discredit to the current electoral system in his final weeks in office, it will be his greatest contribution to American political life next to withdrawing from Afghanistan and aborting the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership.

The most predictable post-election event in American politics is when the leadership of the Democratic Party gathers together for a searing session of self-analysis, only to emerge a few minutes later with the firm conclusion that they haven’t moved far enough to the right and that all of their loses can be blamed on the socialist contagion from within.

I keep hoping that one day there’ll be a presidential candidate who just says very plainly: I don’t want to invade anyone else’s country or drone their wedding parties; I don’t want to torture anyone; I don’t want your family to go bankrupt from the bills for your daughter’s chemo; I want you to be paid fairly for the work you do and not be preyed upon by bill collectors when you’re unemployed; I want you to have a roof over your head and clean water to drink; I don’t want your kids to go hungry at school or be thrown in jail for smoking grass or be shot by the police while walking home from the 7/11; I want you to have time off to enjoy your life and not worry about your house burning down in a wildfire or being swept away in a hurricane. Is that really too much to ask? Where is this person?

In the midst of a killer pandemic and mass unemployment, the Democrats could have offered the nation a universal health care plan, a moratorium on evictions and a guaranteed basic income. Instead, they believed that the key to victory over Trump was to meld neoliberal economics with a neoconservative foreign policy. I don’t know where they got this idea. Probably, the same place Obama got his health insurance plan, the Heritage Foundation.

If you want to finally destroy the electoral college, you should hope that Biden somehow manages to lose the popular vote, because of voter suppression or court rulings prematurely stopping vote counting in some states, but narrowly prevails in the electoral college. It will be gone before Amy Coney Barrett gets her new couture robe blessed by Cardinal Dolan.

Find the remote and flip on CNN to check the headlines, before immediately clicking it off, recalling my vow, made at least once a week, to never watch cable news again. I’ve taken similar vows about reading the New York Times, the Guardian and the Washington Post. But you can’t avoid them. They seek you out, relentlessly track you down, enter your mind, like it or not, like some cyber-Nosferatu, sucking your soul out before you’ve had the chance to fuel yourself with the day’s first bitter cup of Arabica. I think of Eliot’s line about J. Alfred measuring his days with “coffee spoons.” Mine, I fear, will be measured in email downloads. Ain’t it funny how time slips away during Covid and then slips back again, pretty much the same, only darker.

The genius of the Biden campaign is that there really is no Biden campaign. The outcome of the election will almost certainly depend on whether they can resist the temptation to start one over the next three weeks.

A return to normalcy, you say? Normalcy brought us the Iraq War, torture, assassination by drone, 607 billionaires & 600k homeless, the gutting of welfare, warrantless wiretaps, militarized police, the war on drugs, globalized fracking, the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico & an atmospheric C02 level of 411.08 ppm and rising. Screw normalcy.

Donald Trump was just one of 43,000 other Americans who tested positive for COVID today. While nearly all of them paid more in taxes than he did, few will have his resources to fight the ravages of the disease and recover from its financial aftershocks.

I keep hearing about the “legitimacy crisis” that will engulf the Supreme Court if the Senate moves forward with Trump’s expected nomination. Yet when did the institution that rendered Dred Scott (1857), Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Korematsu (1944), Bowers v. Hardwick, upholding Georgia’s sodomy statute (1986) Bush v. Gore (2000), Exxon Shipping v. Baker, revoking punitive damages for Exxon Valdez wreck (2008) and Citizens United (2010) acquire this glittering aura of legitimacy?

I returned home to discover that my old pal George Atiyeh is missing from his home in the Santiam Canyon, located directly in the path of the monstrous Beachey Creek fire. George is the Hayduke of the Ancient Forests. If he went up with the forest he defended all his life, it’s the way he would have chosen to go, like Harry Truman at Mt. St. Helens. But I have the sense he’s out there somewhere, perhaps floating down the Santiam on a big fat Douglas-fir log, cursing the timber industry and the Forest Service, like one of the Stampers from Sometimes a Great Notion…

+ I’m writing this late on Thursday afternoon. The sky is the color of rust. Neil Young’s live rust. The sun is a crimson orb that occasionally bores through the enveloping pall, then recedes. We are under evacuation orders. The fires which have steadily gnawed their way toward us since Monday have reached the upper [...]

Living in America while black, Hispanic or Native American is a comorbidity and you can count on being blamed for your own death, whether you’re killed by a cop or COVID-19.

Day One + The Republican convention began, as all conventions should from now on, by deplatforming its platform. The stale ideologies of the pre-Trump party were replaced over the course of four days by a parade of the ridiculous and the repugnant, gun-slingers and fetus-worshippers, conspiracies and histrionics, white grievance, fake piety and unabashed money-grubbing. [...]

I can’t recall a GOP convention that was as saturated with religious symbolism, moral posturing and spiritual gaslighting as the one the Democrats just inflicted on us…and they didn’t even let Marianne Williamson near a camera.

Kamala Harris is the least surprising VP pick since Bob Dole tapped Jack Kemp as his running mate in 1996. Harris is as bland, safe and predictable as Kemp, but she adds little to an already boring campaign and comes with toxic baggage of her own that may repel the voters Biden needs the most. Biden is counting on Harris’ reputation as a prosecutor to make a case against Trump that most people have already reached a verdict against. Yet, as a prosecutor and attorney general, Harris made a career out of punching below her weight class, sternly going after low-level drug and property crimes while largely turning a blind and forgiving eye to the egregious transgressions of bankers, oil companies, mortgage fraudsters, slumlords, and corrupt police.

“And through the fog of the plague, most art withered into journalism.” — Pete Hamill + Four years of Trump, the most precipitous collapse of the US economy in history and one killer pandemic later and we’re right back to where we were in the late summer of 2016… https://twitter.com/mckaycoppins/status/1291481573053943809   + How could this [...]