In a short and direct statement Friday, Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) presented the case for Congress debating and voting on the United States military intervention in the Middle East that the Obama administration has now escalated with the announced insertion of US special...
Always question why people in government suddenly do something they just about never do. Your questioning may well provide insight into what the government will do next.On Tuesday, author Peter Van Buren, who worked at the United States Department of State for 24...
When I was a kid, three presidents told us we had to fight in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, because if we didn’t fight them over there, we’d have to fight them on the beaches of California. We believed. It was a lie. I was a teenager during the Cold War, and several...
It's bad enough that the US government feels the need to back any state in the Middle East, but of all states to back why Saudi Arabia? This head-chopping champion state tells the US it must back head-choppers in Syria against a secular leader -- in the name of...
"I will not put US boots on the ground in Syria." That was President Obama's unequivocal statement to the American people just two years ago when he first planned to bomb Syria. He has repeated the statement several times, as he has also repeated his promise that he...
Many marijuana legalization proponents are excited by the Wednesday announcement that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) will introduce legislation in the United States Senate that would remove marijuana from the list of banned drugs under the Controlled Substances Act. Many...
Russia’s dramatic intervention in Syria has served to push the conflict in Ukraine (a country that is now partially governed by Star Wars characters) to the back of the world’s collective mind. After all, separatists exchanging fire with government forces and/or...
Economic and foreign interventionism have led us to the edge of the abyss. The Federal Reserve bails out the connected elite and the neocon interventions enrich the military-industrial complex. In both cases the middle class suffers. The interventionists are...
Today the House is expected to vote on the budget "compromise" bill -- outgoing Speaker John Boehner's swan song before retirement. The budget agreement tears up the "sequester" of 2011, which was supposed to limit spending but of course never operated as advertised,...
What a difference a day makes. Just 24 hours ago US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter was telling the Senate Armed Services Committee all about the Obama Administration's new military strategy for the Middle East. The headline grabber from his testimony was the...
US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter told the Senate Armed Services Committee today that United States military forces would soon begin "direct action on the ground" in Iraq and Syria, promising more missions like the recent operation to free hostages in Iraq that...
The US guided-missile destroyer USS Lassen ventured into the 12 mile exclusion set up by the Chinese around two islands it is constructing in the South China Sea. The stated purpose of the US "violation" of Chinese territory was to establish a precedent so as to keep...
Sometimes parents exaggerate in praising their children. But the mother of Niya Kenny, an 18-year-old student at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina, is spot-on when she describes as brave Kenny’s actions in response to school cop Ben Fields on...
At the State Department's daily briefing today, Spokesman John Kirby conceded that the Syrian government led by President Assad may have a role to play in a "political transition" of the country. The apparent shift was in response to a reporter who pointed out that...
The United States does not formally acknowledge the existence of Delta Force, and rarely mentions the names of any of its members, even after they leave the service. Unlike the SEALs, who seem to be prolific writers, Delta operators keep to themselves. Most of the...
Today Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee to outline a new US military strategy for the Middle East. The Secretary admitted the failure of the US “train and equip” program for rebels in Syria, but instead of taking...
Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair over the weekend offered an apology of sorts over the disaster produced by the 2003 US/UK invasion of Iraq. He's "sorry" that the intelligence was wrong, he said, but he's not at all sorry that Saddam Hussein was overthrown. This...
Three weeks and five days into the Russian military operations in Syria, Moscow has achieved the objective of compelling the major external players involved to rethink their established stance on the crisis. Unsurprisingly, new fault lines have appeared in Middle East...
“Fear is a primitive impulse, brainless as hunger, and because the aim of horror fiction is the production of the deepest kinds of fears, the genre tends to reinforce some remarkably uncivilized ideas about self-protection. In the current crop of zombie stories, the...
Last week the US House of Representatives called former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to appear before a select committee looking into the attack on a US facility in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012. The attack left four Americans dead, including US Ambassador to Libya,...
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