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.

Columbia students were right in 1968. History proved it. Columbia students are right today. The university has no good answers to their demands that the school stop investing in genocide. Calling in the NYPD proves it. https://twitter.com/prem_thakker/status/1781052788081848423 + Abbie Hoffman: “The only reason you should be in college is to destroy it.” In Columbia’s case, [...]

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.”

“The police in this country make no distinction between a Black Panther or a black lawyer or my brother or me. The cops aren’t going to ask me my name before they pull the trigger.” —James Baldwin On Wednesday night, the State of Georgia, abetted by the US Supreme Court, executed Willie Pye. It was [...]

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.

Henry Kissinger’s greatest triumph–and perhaps his only real talent– was to seduce three generations of American political and media elites into believing that his diplomatic genius could be measured by the Himalayan heights of the body count he left in his wake.

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.