Matthew Jacobson Normally it is impossible for an individual to choose the family that she or he will be born into. The Modern Republican Party defied the impossible, and chose the family that it wanted to be born into: that of Jim Crow. Or perhaps we should say “James” Crow because the Modern Republican Party…
America the Dutiful By Michael Murry In the Land of the Fleeced and the Home of the Slave Where the cowed and the buffaloed moan Where seldom we find an inquisitive mind And the people pay up with a groan While at home on the range when the firing begins Not a word of encouragement…
By Peter Van Buren. Introduction by b. traven. Peter Van Buren is a former State Department Officer who has an impish sense of humor. He used that to devastating effect in his book, We Meant Well, on our misbegotten venture in Iraq. For telling the unvarnished truth about his service in Iraq, Van Buren was…
b. traven A dimwit president and his neo conservative handlers have left a feckless president and his neo liberal handlers a conflicted, imponderable, and explosive world we now live in. Obama, with the same nationalistic hubris of his predecessor has pivoted our massive sea power to the Pacific and Far East to thwart what he…
Andy Piascik Summer approaches and the stench of war is all around. Or, as the great Bob Marley put it, Everywhere is War. Start with the commemorations over a five-week span of Memorial Day, Flag Day and Independence Day, all presented varyingly as celebrations of our war dead, symbols of our greatness, the freedoms we…
By Don Rose I wonder how much thought the White House gave to the political implications of releasing the Environmental Protections Agency’s new coal emissions standards at this time—five months before the mid-term elections? I’m not concerned about the usual rhetorical attacks from climate-change deniers or even lambasting from the coal industry and its economic…
By Michael Murry. Introduction by William Astore. In 2007 I wrote an article for TomDispatch entitled, “If We Lose Iraq, You’re to Blame.” Its premise was the notion that those most responsible for losing Iraq (Bush/Cheney and Crew) would succeed in deflecting blame from themselves and shifting it onto anyone who opposed the war. Turns…
By Michael Murry “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray …” – Dante Alighieri, The Inferno “Methought I sate beside a public way …” – Percy Shelly, The Triumph of Life A Clockwork Phoenix Epiphany (Lines 1-112 of The Triumph of Strife: an homage to Dante Alighieri and Percy Shelley) A poet woke midway…
By the Editors On June 6, 1944, seventy years ago today, allied forces attacked the Germans at Normandy in France in an immense cross-channel invasion. Omaha Beach was an especially nasty kill zone for American troops, as re-created in Steven Spielberg’s film, “Saving Private Ryan.” After that long and deadly first day, an allied beachhead…
b. traven Last Friday, Eric Shinseki took the fall at Veterans Affairs. His resignation was driven mainly by reports of substandard medical facilities. But substandard medical care for veterans is hardly new (or news): the VA has never been funded adequately by a penny-pinching government that prefers to ladle money to defense contractors for more…
The Contrary Perspective 