The headline read: “Democratic Staffers Told to Let Constant Calls for “Cease-Fire” Go to Voicemail.” This was for a story the Huffington not the Onion, but it serves as an apt description of Biden’s entire political strategy on everything from Gaza, Ukraine, and climate change to health care, the border wall and student loan forgiveness.

Despite billing $480 per hour for his lethal mumbo jumbo, Dr. Coons admitted that not only did he rarely interview the people he assessed, he never followed up to see if his predictions of “future dangerousness” were borne out. In the wake of that decision, Coons stopped testifying in capital cases altogether.

Someone challenged me to come up with anything “nice” to say about Ronald Reagan. I thought for a minute and replied, “Yes, He cut-and-ran as fast as he could from Lebanon after 241 US troops (mostly Marines) were killed in a bombing, instead of starting another Middle East war, as opposed to all of his successors who keep looking for ways to start new ones.”

When you declare total war against Gaza, which has been under perpetual siege since 1967 after being seized by Israel during the Six Day War, what is it you’re going to war against? There are no airbases, no army bases, no tank battalions, no air defense systems, no naval ports, no oil refineries, no rail system, no troop barracks, no armored personnel carriers, no howitzers, no satellite systems, no attack helicopters, no fighter jets, no anti-tank batteries,  no submarines,  no command-and-control centers. Just people, most of them women and kids. It’s why the entire population must be dehumanized, turned into “human animals” whose lives don’t matter.

I’ve been re-reading with great pleasure John Le Carré’s mid-80s novel A Perfect Spy, which is a kind of roman à clef about the writer’s turbulent relationship with his father, Ronnie Cornwell, an extravagant trickster and confidence artist, who, in one of his most elaborate hoaxes, ended up running for Parliament. But Le Carré’s twisty tale of fraud and duplicity among the English moneyed classes (and those who would exploit their greed) can’t really hold up to the career of New Jersey’s own apex con man, Robert Menendez, whose personal embellishments and political fictions have become so labyrinthine that now that he’s been caught with gold bars in his closet, he can’t even get his own life story straight.

First, the two cops knocked on the wrong door. Then they didn’t identify themselves. Then they shot the Lopez family dog. Then they shot Ismail Lopez in the back of the head. Then they cuffed his corpse. Then the city said Lopez had no civil rights to violate because he was an undocumented migrant. Then they walked.

Shortly after learning that a Seattle police officer had run over and killed a woman at a crosswalk, Daniel Auderer, a Seattle cop and the vice-president of the police guild called the union’s president and joked about the young woman’s death. “She is dead,” Auderer says. Then he laughs. “No, it’s a regular person. Yeah, yeah, just write a check, just, yeah.” Auderer laughs again. “$11,000. She was 26 anyway, she had limited value.” Jaahnavi Kandula, who was only 23 when she was killed, was a Master’s student at Northeastern University and financially supporting her mother back in India. The cop who called her a person of “limited value” has been the subject of eighteen Office of Police Accountability investigations since 2014, costing the city more than $2,000,000 in lawsuits.

If you need a reminder of the crimes of the Pinochet regime, which both Thatcher and the Vatican begged the Blair government to turn a blind eye toward, consider the account of Luz de las Nieves Ayress, a 25-year-old graduate student, who was arrested by Pinochet’s secret police shortly after the overthrow of Salvador Allende. In a sworn statement, Ayress recounted that after her arrest she was stripped naked, had a electrodes attached to her mouth, ears, breasts, vagina and anus, then was repeatedly shocked with electric currents. But this ordeal, Ayress wrote, was “the easy part.” They “electroshocked everyone,” she said. Then the torture got much worse. During her four-year prison term, months of which were spent in solitary confinement, Ayress says she was repeatedly raped, had her breasts and stomach slashed, and was sexually assaulted by dogs.

The tragedy of Lahaina is compounded by the kind of government incompetence corporate indifference we witnessed in New Orleans. Despite repeated warnings, Hawaiian Electric refused to shut down the power lines, which have contributed to killer fires in California and Oregon, even as they were whipped apart by near hurricane-force winds, sending spark-showering wires writhing in parched grasses. Then, the only road out of town was barricaded by police and cars were either stuck in line or sent back into the burning town. Only those chose to drive around it ended up surviving the fast-moving fires. During Katrina, the bridge to Gretna was one of the few ways out of the flooded city, until police used force to stop desperate pedestrians, most of whom were black, from crossing it.

Usually Monk walked. He ambled across the city on feet as light as a tap-dancer. He weaved his way down block after block, whistling, humming, snapping his fingers. Monk liked to take different routes, but most of them led eventually to the Hudson River, where the large man in the strange hat would lean on the railing and watch the lights of the city dance on the black water.

A trove of newly disclosed documents show how Robert Oppenheimer’s boss, the imperious Gen. Lesley Groves, repeatedly downplayed the risk of radiation exposure from atomic testing and the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki themselves. Groves claimed those hit with lethal doses of radiation would die “without undue suffering. In fact, they say it is a very pleasant way to die.” Oppenheimer himself was intimately aware of Groves’ deceptions about the dangers of radioactive fallout. But even after leaving the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer kept quiet about the grotesque consequences of Groves’ lies.

Japan was on the brink of defeat before the atomic blasts and, in fact, it is now clear that the Truman Administration was rushing to use the bombs before the Soviets entered the war, fearing they might have to divide up a defeated Japan into zones of occupation as they had Germany. The atomic bombs themselves,  Little Boy (Hiroshima) and Fat Man (Nagasaki), have now become fetishized as macabre instruments of mass death, even to the point of replicas being sold in US National Parks and Museums.

I finally unearthed my notebook from the day of that first call from Sinéad. There’s a funny bit I’d forgotten. After we’d smoothed the waters and she agreed to drop her suit and write for us instead, O’Connor said: “One more thing, Jeffrey [the fierceness returning to her voice] You’ve got to promise never to run another story by that fucking c-word (she could outswear Lemmy from Mötorhead) Ruth Fowler!” Fowler had written the offensive piece. I replied, a little tremulously now: “No. I promise not to banish you no matter what outrageous thing you write or what nasty shit they say about you and I won’t ban Ruth, either.” She sighed. “OK, a girl has to try. Bye lover.” Bye lover. How could I have ever forgotten?

Is AIPAC obsolete? It seems clear the political obedience to Israel on the Hill has been fully internalized by both parties with the occasional heterodoxical strays being severely disciplined from the inside before the Israel lobby can even crank out a press release. Last week we were presented with a perfect example of how this dynamic plays out. During a panel discussion at the NetRoots conference, progressive caucus chair Pramila Jayapal called Israel “a racist state.”  Her remarks would be unremarkable, anywhere but here, where they set off a political alarm system that blared across the continent. Jayapal’s diagnosis is, of course, something Israelis, including Israeli Jews, say about their own country nearly every day. Indeed, they could have read the speeches of Benjamin Netanyahu himself, who declared: “Israel is not a state of all its citizens but rather, the nation state of the Jewish people and only them.”

Whatever your thoughts about NATO or the war in Ukraine (I recoil at both), it’s hard not to feel some sympathy with Volodymyr Zelensky’s frustration at being left outside the clubhouse gates, chastised by Biden that Ukraine is not yet “democratic” enough for membership in the West’s elite protection racket. This rebuff comes from a consortium that includes Poland, Hungary and Turkey, a nation NATO supremos courted assiduously in order to win the entry of the new recruit they really wanted: Sweden. Of course the price of Sweden’s admission into the Brussels-based syndicate seems to have been giving Erdogan the green light to crackdown even more repressively on Kurds, inside and outside Turkey. But when have the Kurds ever really mattered? Like the Ukrainians, the Kurds have long served as disposable pawns in larger regional power plays by NATO, Russia and the US.

Anyone who presumes to tell you what is going on in Russia now is almost certainly wrong. That includes me. So caveat lector. It is a war that confounds predictions, a war of dizzying turns, blunders and prolonged stagnation, as if from the beginning the conflict had entered not so much a deep fog as a hall of mirrors, where even professional deceivers emerge deceived.

In May of this year on the northern border of Yellowstone, a wolf-hating rancher lured another pack of Yellowstone wolves out of the park to his ranch. He baited the wolves by setting out sheep carcasses on his property. The rancher waited until park wolves showed up and opened fire, killing a black two-year old female, who had been born and reared in Yellowstone’s Hayden Valley.

When I think about victims of the Espionage Act, my thoughts immediately go to Ethel Rosenberg, convicted not, as many believe, for treason, but of being engaged in a conspiracy to commit “espionage ” The case against Ethel was thin and manufactured. Even J. Edgar Hoover opposed her execution, which was in the hands of Federal Judge Irving Kaufman, a close friend of her tormentor and prosecutor Roy Cohn.  In condemning the couple to death, Kaufman bizarrely  blamed them for starting the Korean War, a judgement so irrational it alone should have been grounds for reversal. It was later revealed that over the course of the trial and again before imposing the death penalty, Kaufman had engaged in secret and grossly unethical communications with Cohn, conversations which sealed Ethel’s fate. Her electrocution was nothing short of judicial murder.

Before leaving Gore with the check, Cockburn reached into his leather saddlebag and extracted a copy of The Politics of Anti-Semitism. “Jeffrey and I thought you might enjoy reading our latest bit of heresy.” Vidal turned to the table of contents, grunted and said, “As someone who has been scurrilously tarred as an anti-semite myself, why wasn’t I asked to contribute?” Good question. “The next volume is entirely yours, Gore,” Alex offered. Vidal thumbed through the collection and stopped at one of the chapters. “Ah, the Liberty!” Vidal exclaimed. “That’s where it all began. If you can kill American sailors and still get rewarded with fighter jets, you can get away with any atrocity. The story needs to be told and retold until the implications finally sink in!”

As Biden himself admitted, the fake fight over the Debt Ceiling was really fight over the budget, in which there were two sides making demands: rightwing Republicans and far right Republicans. The Democrats asked for nothing and got less. The Far Right demanded all they could think of, got it and now wants more. This is how the game is played and only one party is playing it.

Brown’s Cost of War project estimates that around 4.6 million people have perished as a result of the post-911 wars. The Brown researchers could have added another million or so wrecked lives back here on the home front. Decades of war abroad have left the US with a rotting infrastructure and paralyzed political system, its population poorer, sicker and more unequal, its streets filled the homeless and the addicted, its prisons swollen, its social welfare programs gutted, its schools turned into shooting galleries and its life expectancy rate in free fall. Every drone and missile strike in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen left an economic crater crater in places like Mobile, Des Moines, Roanoke and Tacoma.

Some people read Marx to learn how to exploit the holes in the capitalist system to make even more money. But that is not our experience. We read Marx to understand why we don’t have any and struggle to even ask for it, which, I suppose, is why we’re a non-profit in legal theory and [...]

The killing of Jordan Neely reminded many people of the subway vigilante Bernard Goetz.  But you can’t whitewash this homicide as an act of vigilante justice. Jordan Neely didn’t attack or threaten to assault anyone. At worst, he was having a bad day, an episode of despair, where he was trying to tell anyone who would listen that he was tired, hungry and thirsty. Apparently, this expression of existential anguish was all it took to ignite the murderous resentment of the white ex-Marine. He didn’t want to hear it. Apparently, this is the way white men fight, after all, Tucker.

Tucker Carlson’s transformation from the brattish scion of a “Deep State” diplomat and former head of Voice of America to a bow-tie-wearing talk show smart-aleck into the white working-class tribune of Fox Populi is one of the greatest acts of political crossdressing in American history.

Dr. Bruce Jessen, the CIA’s torture shrink, was forced reenact his waterboarding technique on a defense attorney for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the Saudi detainee who is being tried for plotting to bomb the USS Cole. In court, Jessen rolled up a towel, twisted it around the neck of defense lawyer, Annie Morgan, slowly pulled the lawyer toward him and lifted her up on her toes, at which point Jessen protested to the court: “It feels like I’m beating up my daughter.”

Veterans of the CIA’s Phoenix Program always seem to make soft landings with a golden parachute: a lifetime guarantee of gainful employment. CounterPunch reported on the ascent into the Congress of Robert Simmons, a Phoenix veteran and adept at torture. Then there’s the case of former senator Bob Kerrey, who commanded a Phoenix operation in the Mekong delta that featured throat-slitting and the assassination of elderly men and women and children. Now comes word that Phoenix veterans are also highly sought after by the upper echelons of the corporate world.

People griping about the trivial nature of the charges against Trump seem to have forgotten that the aggressive enforcement of trivial offenses has been the hallmark of American policing for 40 years, put into vicious deployment by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani with Trump cheering him on. With hundreds of thousands of people arrested and jailed for minor offenses like subway fare evasion, loitering, jaywalking, or selling single cigarettes, isn’t it time we applied the Broken Windows Theory to political crimes and hold to account the people who enforced it on others?

“You can’t talk about fucking in America, people say you’re dirty. But if you talk about killing somebody, that’s cool.” ― Richard Pryor The US is not going to solve its gun violence epidemic until it addresses its war violence epidemic. There’s a reason the AR-15 has become the weapon of choice for post-Gulf War [...]

Majid wasn’t tortured for information. He wasn’t tortured for names or account numbers. He’d long ago surrendered, willingly, all he knew. Majid Khan was tortured for behavior control. Whatever that behavior was. He was tortured when he complied and when he resisted. He was tortured for asserting any act of will. The point, if by the end there was a point beyond sating the power lust of his torturers, was to annihilate his personality, his own sense of himself. But here the CIA failed.

They came at dusk, wearing masks. They carried automatic rifles, pistols, knives and clubs. They swung chains. They hauled cans of petrol. They came out of the hills bent on revenge, 400 riotous Israeli settlers. They came with the intent of making the villagers of Huwara pay for the deaths of two Israeli settlers, killed that morning on the road to the settlement of Har Bracha, a settlement built on lands seized from Palestinians in 1983. They came shouting slurs and “Death to the Arabs.” They came to make Hawara burn.

Politicians usually rush to the scenes of natural disasters to get photo-ops with the displaced. If they’d show up at environmental calamities while the air is still black, they might be more inclined to do something. But Biden is moving even more lethargically on the Great Toxic Derailment Event than Obama did during the poisoning of Flint, where some will recall the Minister of Hope finally showed up to take a performative quaff of water in front of the cameras. (Flint still doesn’t have safe water.)  Railroad Joe hasn’t even taken a single breathe of East Palestine’s air.

Shortly after 6 PM on the evening of February 7, Leonard “Raheem” Taylor was executed by the state of Missouri for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit: the 2004 murder of Angela Rowe and her three children in suburban St. Louis. Rowe had been Taylor’s girlfriend. She and her children shot and killed in the house she shared with Taylor. In the 19 years since the murders, Taylor never wavered in asserting his innocence and much of the evidence in the case backed him up and always has.

In 2021, there were 1055 people killed by police in the US. In the same year, 31 people were killed by police in all of Europe (Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, Malta, Netherlands, UK, Ireland, Poland, Denmark, and Norway) combined.

Earlier this week, while driving across the Oregon outback, I switched on the radio hoping to pick up a recorded sermon by one of the great old-time evangelists of the 50s and 60s on a subject like demonic possession and communism that you often find lurking on the far end of the dial. But the only channel with a static-free signal was pumping out the Glenn Beck Show, who I hadn’t heard since he blew his Faustian deal with CNN.