Twenty-five years ago this week, the streets of Seattle erupted into the kind of militant protest rarely seen in the US. Over the course of five days, thousands of street activists counterpunched the global managers of neoliberalism in the face at their own confab, humiliated Bill Clinton and took the ruling class entirely off guard. The battle in Seattle became a kind of operational template for the popular protests of the both the right and left that followed in its wake: Code Pink’s anti-Iraq war demos, the Occupy Movement, the Tea Party, Black Lives Matter and, even, MAGA. The populist right certainly absorbed more lessons from the Battle of Seattle than the liberal elites of the Democratic Party–to their peril and ultimate doom.

The hysteria over Trump’s election must be tempered by just how awful Biden has been after the entirely predictable, if sinister, decision of the American electorate to return Trump to power. The liberal abreaction to Trump has revealed how thoroughly blind many have been to the vileness of Biden and his obedient circle of advisors and enforcers. If there was a secret Biden waiting until after the election to emerge, it was only a more malicious and baleful version of the Biden we’ve witnessed for the last four years. 

It’s been a hallucinatory week, which I hope explains my momentary lapse of reason in believing that an unshackled and restored Trump just might follow through on his vow to drive the neocon contagion from the halls of executive power, if only out of revenge for plotting against him for the last eight years. After all, this was the man who evicted John Bolton. (The right side of my brain reminds me that this was also the man who hired John Bolton and the equally odious Elliot Abrams.)

In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump amplified his anti-war rhetoric. Why? According to the New York Times, internal polling showed that still undecided voters were “six times as likely as other battleground-state voters to be motivated by their views of Israel’s war in Gaza.” Either the Harris campaign missed this lurking demographic or, more likely, just didn’t care. Of course, Trump’s still going to give Netanyahu the greenlight to burn Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon to the ground and then target Iran.

Kamala Harris proved too cowardly to even address her supporters Tuesday night, as her loss to Trump became more and more inevitable. But what could she really say? She couldn’t honestly say she’d run a hard campaign that championed the poor, the downtrodden, the voiceless, or that she’d fought for peace, human dignity and to fix an unraveling climate. I’d be really interested to hear her say what she thought her campaign was all about, but even Harris probably couldn’t have pinpointed the purpose or the meaning of her doomed run…

Cockburn used to say, vote for whoever makes you happy, knowing that the vote-counting machines will probably record it for someone you despise. So I filled out my ballot, though not very joyfully, and drove to the drop-off site in our little mill town, where the ballot box was being “monitored” by four MAGA people, adorned in their red hats, who, undeterred by the drenching rain, recorded my arrival on their cellphones and asked to see my ID, a request I replied to with a customary Italian gesture, as I told them had left my papers in Juarez.

More than half of Trump’s supporters don’t believe he’ll actually do many of the things he claims he’ll do (mass deportations, siccing the military on domestic protesters and political rivals), while more than half of Harris’s supporters hope she’ll implement many of the policies (end the genocide/single-payer) she claims she won’t. And that pretty much sums up this election.

A retaliatory military operation that many wizened pundits predicted would last no more than a month or so has now thundered on in ever-escalating episodes of violence and mass destruction for a year with no sign of relenting. What began as a war of vengeance has become a war of annihilation, not just of Hamas, but of Palestinian life and culture in Gaza and beyond.

There are already hundreds of allegations of price-gouging after Hurricane Helene and Milton. Harris was against price-gouging for about two days, then backed down after getting slapped by blowhards like Larry Summers–the Dick Cheney of economics. Nothing since, even though the evidence is everywhere. McDonalds is now suing the meatpacking industry for price-fixing…

This week’s vice-presidential debate, one of the most tedious and dull in US history, was praised by the punditocracy for its civility. Is civility in politics what we want when the current government is arming a genocide and the rival campaign wants to arrest 15 million people and deport them?

The State of Missouri executed Marcellus “Khalifah” Williams on Tuesday night despite knowing he was most likely innocent of the crime he was condemned for.

Miss Sassy started the biggest political fire since Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lamp and burned down Chicago. Last month, Miss Sassy disappeared from the sight of her owner, Anna Kilgore, a Trump-Vance fanatic in Springfield, Ohio. After a couple of days, Kilgore called 9-11, claiming that her Calico cat may have been stolen and devoured by her Haitian neighbors, who she’d never bothered to get to know.

So Harris pretty effectively rebutted GOP accusations that she’s a communist, Marxist, socialist, pacifist, progressive, environmentalist, civil libertarian or humanist.

A country that tolerates the routine shootings of its own school children as the cost of doing business in our weird notion of a “free society” is unlikely to feel any empathy for Palestinian children killed by the weapons we sell Israel. Violence is our chief export; indifference to the bloodshed is our national characteristic.

True to form, Trump has now taken to calling Kamala Harris “low IQ” and “stupid,” racist tropes he draws on whenever he’s confronted by minorities, women or both. But for all her faults, Harris isn’t stupid. In fact, she’s demonstrated her ability to swiftly master and deftly deploy the finer points of Clintonian triangulation, the strategy of political bait-and-switch that prioritizes running against the core issues held by her own party, even policies she once enthusiastically promoted as signature features of her own previous campaigns. Pulling this off required some pretty adroit political gymnastics, where Harris had to completely reverse herself without showing the strain over long-held positions on fracking, immigration, asylum, a human rights-based foreign policy, student loan forgiveness, torture, the death penalty, and a single-payer health care system. But she sold these policy retreats so smoothly that the Democratic base eagerly embraced her joyful politics of austerity, aggressive policing and genocide with a smile.

“When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there’s nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man [...]

In 2002, Robert Roberson raced his two-year-old daughter, Nikki, to a hospital emergency room in the east Texas town of Palestine.  Nikki was limp, her skin blue.  Roberson told the emergency room doctors and nurses that the two had been sleeping when he awoke and found Nikki on the floor, having fallen off the bed. The child was unresponsive. Nikki Curtis never regained consciousness and died a few days later.

Deputy Sean Grayson didn’t turn on his body camera until after he’d shot Sonya Massey three times. This is probably why he thought he could get away with saying he killed Massey in self-defense, as she was charging toward him with a pot of boiling water. What Grayson didn’t realize is that his partner’s body cam recorded the entire fatal encounter, showing that the diminutive, unarmed Massey was hiding from the Springfield deputy, when Grayson walked around the kitchen counter, shot her in the face and left her to bleed out. Then he lied about it…lies that were caught on tape and exposed as lies on tape.

Before Biden revealed his incompetence at the debate with Trump, he’d already lost his reelection bid by showing his gross immorality in arming the genocide in Gaza. Biden had been trailing Trump in the polls since last October and deservedly so. His withdrawal won’t redeem his reputation, which will forever be stained by the mounds of dead Palestinian children he helped kill and showed no remorse for.

Trump’s would-be assassin, Crooks didn’t seem overtly political. His politics were the politics of the gun. He searched for the names of Biden and Trump, equally, it seemed and was likely to have pulled the trigger on the first one who entered the sights of his AR-15. There was just a dime’s worth of difference between them as far as he was concerned. Crooks is the next variation on Kyle Rittenhouse, a fucked up white kid, working a dead-end job in a shabbily run nursing home, who ventured forth bound for glory with a semi-automatic rifle in the Republic of the Shooter.

Biden held his first press conference in a year last Thursday. His staff had promoted the event all week as a “Big Boy” press conference that would demonstrate to NATO leaders and the American public that his inept performance during his debate against Trump two weeks ago that so terrified the Democratic donor class was merely an aberration and that the President still had the mojo to run the Empire.

When people say, “Joe Biden’s a decent man,” what Biden are they talking about? The man who befriended Strom Thurmond, the man who treated Anita Hill dismissively, the man who plagiarized Neil Kinnock’s speeches, the man who crafted the most punitive and racist crime laws of the 20th Century, the man who voted for the Iraq war and armed a genocide?

I grew up south of Indianapolis on the glacier-smoothed plains of central Indiana. My grandparents owned a small farm, whittled down over the years to about 40 acres of bottomland, in some of the most productive agricultural land in America. Like many of their neighbors they mostly grew field corn (and later soybeans), raised a few cows and bred a few horses.

Seymour Hersh said Biden isn’t all there. Thomas Friedman and Jane Fonda were reduced to tears. Rob Reiner, who watched the debate with Fonda in LA in the company of Doug Emhoff, the husband of Biden’s VP Kamala Harris, screamed at the TV: “We’ve lost.” One of the party’s top money-bundlers told Politico: “Our only hope is that he bows out, we have a brokered convention or he dies. Otherwise, we are fucking dead.”

It was, as prosecutors often say, an evidence-rich crime scene. Felicia Gayle’s murderer left behind footprints in her blood, fingerprints, hair, and, most crucially, DNA on the knife used to kill her. The problem was: none of the evidence implicated the person the DA charged, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the crime.

The entire time Al-Hadi was held in Afghanistan he never saw the sun, never knew what time it was, when to say his prayers or in which direction to say them. Unlike many other CIA prisoners, who were blasted with loud music, Al-Hadi was condemned to six months of silence. From his Quiet Cell, he couldn’t hear street noises, bird songs or human voices. He was living in a void.

The Americans knew. The Americans helped. The Americans provided the bombs, the helicopters, the fighter jets, the bullets and the tank shells. The Americans watched the attack unfold. They watched from Biden’s pier. They watched from drones. They watched as the streets filled with blood, bodies and limbs. Afterward, the Americans praised the rescue operation and said nothing about the dead Palestinian children and women. Nothing about the amputees and the eviscerated. Nothing about the three hostages who were also apparently killed in the Israeli attack, including an American citizen. 

In eight months of war, Israel has killed thirty times more children in Gaza than Russia has killed Ukrainian children in two years and years months of war. Gaza’s population is just 1/15th the size of Ukraine’s. But instead of sanctioning Israel, Biden and Blinken have threatened to sanction the one agency that’s tried to hold it accountable: the ICJ. Every atrocity Israel gets away with encourages it to do something even more grotesque.

In one of the most egregious uses of the pardon power since Bill Clinton freed billionaire tax cheat, Israeli agent and international fugitive Marc Rich as the clock struck midnight on his lamentable administration, last week Texas Gov. Greg Abbott freed an avowed racist who ran a red light, before plunging his car into a crowd of protesters and fatally shooting a man who was trying to protect people from being run over. Abbott granted the killer a pardon, even though the gunman had been obsessed for months with the idea of killing BLM activists.

Since October 7, the Biden administration has approved more than 100 Foreign Military Sales arms transfers to Israel. Two of the shipments used an emergency authority to circumvent Congressional review. The surge of weapons transfers to Israel began in early October and so much material was being shipped that the Pentagon had a difficult time finding enough cargo aircraft to deliver them.

Adnan Al-Bursh was intelligent, humane, and committed. He could speak multiple languages. He saw and could explain the ravages of the occupation and the horrors of the war. He was exactly the kind of person, like the still imprisoned Marwan Barghouti, Israel has always feared might become a leader of the Palestinian people. For that reason, he was also exactly the kind of person Israel has been targeting for elimination under the cover of its bombardment and invasion of Gaza.

As America’s liberal elites declare open warfare on their own kids, it’s easy to see why they’ve shown no empathy at all for the murdered, maimed and orphaned children of Gaza. Back-of-the-head shots to 8-year-olds seem like a legitimate thing to protest in about the most vociferous way possible…But, as Dylan once sang, maybe I’m too sensitive or else I’m getting soft.

In the state’s closing arguments jurors were treated to the spectacle of the prosecutor in Brenda’s case, Gayland Gieger, hauling a suitcase toward the jury box, from which he extracted a pair of her thong panties, which he waved in front of them, saying, to audible gasps in the courtroom: “This [dangling a pink thong] is what we found in [the suitcase]. It’s been introduced into evidence. The grieving widow packs this [brandishing a red thong] to run off with her boyfriend. The grieving widow packs this [pulling out a black thong] to go sleep in a hotel room with her children and her boyfriend. The grieving widow packs this [pulling out a lacy bra] in her appropriate act of grief.”

There are many ways to kill a wolf in America. But most of them are mundane and prosaic. They’re not likely to bring you acclaim and notoriety. Few will hear about your feat if you simply gun down a wolf from a helicopter, kill a wolf with an M-80 cyanide bomb, pour gas into a wolf den filled with pups and strike a match, put out a contract on a wolf with a hired killer from the government, track down a wolf with a drone and shoot it with a long-range rifle and telescopic scope, inject rat poison in an elk carcass and wait for wolves (and whoever else) to feed on it and die an agonizing death, run one over with your cybertruck or, like the current Governor of Montana, catch a wolf in a trap and then after it has struggled to free itself for a few painful days heroically shoot it.

The darkly ironic thing is that World Central Kitchens was supposed to serve as Biden’s replacement for UNRWA, a private relief effort under the control of the US, instead of the UN. Some Palestinians had even come to view Andrés as a US agent, his group a kind of Blackwater in humanitarian garb. And the Israelis just blew it up: one, two, three. Because any sustained aid to the Palestinians subverts their goal of using starvation to force them to either die or leave Gaza. The arrogance would stun anyone but the benumbed Biden.

When Joe Lieberman arrived in the US Senate in 1989, Strom Thurmond greeted him by saying, “I understand we think a lot alike in the way we do things.” “Yes, sir, I think we do,” admitted Lieberman. Strom probably learned about this reassuring profile of Lieberman’s center-right political beliefs from his weekly lunch dates in the Senate cafeteria with Joe Biden who, like Lieberman, was one of the founding nowhere men of the Democratic Leadership Council, whose mission was to keep the Democratic Party from ever straying to the Left of Michael Dukakis…

Willie Pye’s lawyer was not only incompetent, he was also, according to other lawyers, a racist, and frequently made racial slurs about his own clients, telling one colleague he thought “young black men were lazy” and saying of another client facing execution: “This little nigger deserves the death penalty.”

Human kind Cannot bear very much reality. – T.S. Eliot. “Burnt Norton” + An AP poll from this week found that 6 in 10 US adults doubt the mental capability of Biden and Trump. + What it looks like when the Void stares into you… https://twitter.com/Suzy_1776/status/1765111009298055614 + Biden obsessively pursues deals with the far right–even [...]

As Biden moves to out-Trump Trump on the border, he may end up wrecking what’s left of the economy. A recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report credits the “migrant surges” with adding $7 trillion to the US economy, lowering the federal deficit and being the prime reason the US economy has outpaced EU nations since the pandemic.

The massacre on that street in Tel al-Hawa took place three days after Israel had been put on notice by the International Court of Justice that it needed to stop committing acts of genocide, stop killing civilians, stop killing children and health care workers, a ruling that Israel has not just ignored but openly defied. Instead, Israel blames the victims of its atrocities. Tel al-Hawa was a closed military zone, the IDF says. Any Palestinians moving on the streets were legitimate targets, the IDF says. The rules of engagement were those of the US troops at My Lai: shoot anything that moves. Even young girls and the paramedics who rushed to treat their wounds.

The Democrats now have the perfect excuse for Biden betraying nearly every promise he made during his 2020 campaign, unfortunately for them it will prove fatal to his reelction: he doesn’t remember making them. According to the Special Counsel’s report on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, Biden is “an elderly man with a faulty memory.” And his memory got “worse” over the course of the investigation to the point where Biden “did not remember when he was vice president” or “even within several years, when his son Beau died.”

Kenneth Smith was executed by the state of Alabama for a contract killing. He was paid by a pastor to murder his wife. The state of Alabama paid an execution squad to strap Kenneth Smith to a death gurney, clamp a mask over his face, and suffocate him to death with nitrogen gas. Smith thrashed and convulsed for at least four minutes as the nitrogen squeezed the oxygen out of his lungs. What is the message here?

The problem with American politics isn’t that it’s polarized (we need more polarization over inequality, over war, over climate), but that it’s polarized around two of the most inept and ridiculous figures in American history. The only two people Americans can apparently think of to run their dying Empire have both lost their frigging marbles, if they ever had any, which is a sure sign that your Empire is in fact dying.

Though you may not have heard about it given the minimal press coverage, over 400,000 people converged on DC last weekend to demand an end to the US-financed war in Gaza. That’s 300,000 more people than voted in the Iowa caucuses on Monday night, many of whom cast their preferences on slips of paper stuffed into paper bags. Still, Trump barely won a majority of his own party’s vote. As my friend Michael Colby noted: “In 1980, Carter got 59% of the caucus vote (Kennedy got 32%) and he was considered toast for the general election.” Trump won about the same percentage of the Iowa vote as LBJ did in New Hampshire in 1968, a humiliating showing that prompted him to pull out of the race.

The first time the State of Alabama tried to kill Kenneth Eugene Smith, he was strapped to the death gurney for four agonizing hours, while lawyers for the state scrambled to overturn a federal appeals court injunction that had halted the planned execution earlier in the day on the grounds that Alabama’s method of execution might violate Smith’s rights against cruel and unusual punishment. 

I shed no tears for Harvard, an institution that has inflicted untold misery and bloodshed on the world. For all I care, it could become the target of a hostile takeover by financial pirates trained in its own classrooms, access to which they gained through legacy admissions. This is, of course, pretty much what happened, at least in the mind of one of the homegrown Visigoths who breached its ivy-tangled walls in search of the university president’s head. 

An off-duty Chicago cop named Joseph Cabrera shoots at an unarmed man that he was harassing while driving drunk. The cop then calls CPD, lies about the incident and has the person he shot at arrested, saying he attacked the cop. Eventually the lies unravel, but the cop’s charges are reduced and he ends up with probation in a plea deal. When other defendants in the court room awaiting their cases heard the details of the case, one gasped, “He’s a cop?” Another said, “He got probation?…Damn!”

The defining characteristic of Biden’s political career has been to make compromises with the right, no matter how far right the right gets. What started with amicable lunches with Strom Thurmond has ended with him knee-deep in a genocidal war with Netanyahu. It’s no surprise that Biden ended up here. It’s where he’s always been headed.  It’s mildly surprising that the rest of the party has so willingly gone along for the ride, on a doomed political trajectory fueled by burning the aspirations of their own base.

+ Americans are experiencing a rare chance to relive in real-time echoes of the darkest episodes of our own history–from the howitzering of the exhausted Nez Perce in the Bear Paws to the slaughter of nearly frozen Lakota women and children at Wounded Knee; from the interment of Japanese-Americans to the grotesqueries of Abu Ghraib–and seem to have decided it was all for the greater good.