Featured Articles

Trump, Iran and the Obama Strategic Blueprint

Trump, Iran and the Obama Strategic Blueprint

by | Jan 14, 2025 |

Like a smashed antique clock – with its elaborate cogs, ratchet wheels and innards splayed out from the casing – so the mechanics of the Middle East lie similarly exposed and broken. All the region is in play – Syria, Lebanon, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt and Iran. The original Obama strategic blueprint for containing and balancing the potentially violent energies of West Asia was subsequently handed to Team Biden at the end of the Obama term – and it still clearly bore the Obama imprimatur right up...

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Sanctions – Trump’s Only Old/New Iran Policies

Sanctions – Trump’s Only Old/New Iran Policies

by | Jan 14, 2025 |

I had missed this Friday news item on Iran: Trump's Ukraine envoy says world must reinstate 'maximum pressure' on Iran PARIS, Jan 11 (Reuters) - The world must return to a policy of 'maximum pressure' against Iran to turn it into a more democratic country, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's incoming Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg told an Iranian opposition event in Paris on Saturday. Trump has vowed to return to the policy he pursued in his previous term that sought to wreck Iran's economy to...

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The Moral Depravity of US Sanctions and Embargoes

The Moral Depravity of US Sanctions and Embargoes

by | Jan 13, 2025 |

In the December 29, 2024, issue of the conservative Wall Street Journal, the paper’s longtime columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady, who also serves on the Journal’s editorial board, wrote an article harshly criticizing the dictatorships in Cuba and Venezuela. Quoting a State Department statement issued in January 2021, she points out that the Cuban communist regime is a murderous supporter of terrorism that lets the Cuban people “go hungry, homeless, and without medicine.” O’Grady also...

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Cutting Slovakia’s Gas Supplies May Well Backfire on Zelensky

Cutting Slovakia’s Gas Supplies May Well Backfire on Zelensky

by | Jan 13, 2025 |

On 1 January, Ukraine ceased to allow the transit of Russia gas to Europe. This ended almost uninterrupted supply of Russian piped gas to Europe, through sovereign Ukraine, since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some in the west have celebrated this as victory over Russia. More likely, it will backfire on Ukraine’s NATO and European aspirations. I have always considered the sale, purchase and supply of gas or any other commodity as an entirely commercial matter. In that regard, even...

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2025 New Year’s Resolutions, Part Two

2025 New Year’s Resolutions, Part Two

by | Jan 13, 2025 |

Even though we are two weeks into 2025, I want to suggest some more New Year’s resolutions. The Federal Reserve should resolve to stop enabling excessive federal spending by purchasing Treasury bonds, thus monetizing the federal debt. The Federal Reserve’s monetization of federal debt enables the federal government to amass trillions in debt while running a global empire abroad and a welfare state at home. The American people feel the effects of the Fed’s debt monetization in the form of the...

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Can Trump Save America From Itself?

Can Trump Save America From Itself?

by | Jan 11, 2025 |

Russian FM Lavrov last week dismissed Team Trump’s floated peace proposals for Ukraine as unsatisfactory. Essentially, the Russian view is that the calls for a frozen conflict precisely miss the point: From the Russian perspective, such ideas – frozen conflicts, ceasefires, and peacekeepers – do not begin to qualify as the type of treaty-based, “Big Picture” deal the Russians have been advocating since 2021. Without a sustainable, permanent end to conflict, the Russians will prefer to rely on...

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Defining the Deep State

Defining the Deep State

by | Jan 11, 2025 |

The phrase, Deep State, is now a staple of political vocabulary, but people who have not worked in the Washington bureaucracies, especially those tied to national security and intelligence, may not appreciate the meaning. I will try to define it for you. What I offer below is an attempt to define a complex, dynamic system in simple terms. I ask your forgiveness in advance if I have overlooked some key variables. I place the birth of the Deep State in the early 1990s, during the...

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Killing the Constitution at Gitmo

Killing the Constitution at Gitmo

by | Jan 10, 2025 |

When British kings wanted to dispose of troublesome enemies -- real or imagined -- they often had them or their colleagues arrested on pretextual charges and then brutally tortured until confessions were extracted. The confessions were then read aloud during so-called trials; and, of course, the defendant was convicted of whatever crime was the subject of the confession. All this was done in order to satisfy the political, and in many cases the personal, desires of the monarch by creating the...

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House Passes Bill To Sanction Cooperation With The ICC Following Netanyahu Arrest Warrant

House Passes Bill To Sanction Cooperation With The ICC Following Netanyahu Arrest Warrant

by | Jan 10, 2025 |

When newly re-elected Speaker Of The House Mike Johnson was first elected to the chair in 2023, his first act of business was to advance a bill providing an additional $14.3 billion in aid to Israel to fund its war in Gaza. This came after the House Of Representatives entered into a period of stasis following the historic success of the Motion To Vacate filed against Kevin McCarthy that would depose him as Speaker Of The House and replace him with Johnson. Despite the backlog of work Congress...

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Sen. Fetterman Claims He is Puzzled Why Americans Protest His Support of Israel’s Decimation of Gaza

Sen. Fetterman Claims He is Puzzled Why Americans Protest His Support of Israel’s Decimation of Gaza

by | Jan 9, 2025 |

In a Wednesday Twitter post, United States Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) expressed his confusion why “[z]ero dopes have shown up at my home or office, or blocked a road to chant and protest over an actual genocide in Sudan.” Proceeding, he questioned why “South Africa engaged the ICJ over Gaza, but not for an actual genocide on their own continent” — in Sudan. “ICJ” in Fetterman’s tweet refers to the International Court of Justice that ruled in January of last year that the Israel government may...

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Jimmy Carter’s Hypocritical Olympic Boycott

Jimmy Carter’s Hypocritical Olympic Boycott

by | Jan 9, 2025 |

According to an article in the Washington Post, Gene Mills, a U.S. citizen who was one of the top amateur wrestlers in the world, stated, “He stole my life. That was my life. He took it away from me.” Mills was referring to President Jimmy Carter, who recently passed away at the age of 100. It was Carter who ordered U.S. athletes to boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, Russia. The reason? Carter used the boycott to protest the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There were...

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‘Police Officers were Injured and Killed’: Klobuchar Repeats Common False Claim About January 6th

‘Police Officers were Injured and Killed’: Klobuchar Repeats Common False Claim About January 6th

by | Jan 9, 2025 |

Minnesota Democrat Sen. Amy Klobuchar this week was hit by a “community note” flagging a common false statement made about January 6th and how multiple officers were killed that day. Democratic leaders routinely refer to multiple deaths of officers when the only person to die on January 6th was Ashli Babbitt, a killing of an unarmed protester that remains controversial after a whitewashing by the Capitol Police. Klobuchar, who has been a vocal supporter of censorship to...

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Welcome to 2025: Where Your Freedoms Go to Die

Welcome to 2025: Where Your Freedoms Go to Die

by | Jan 9, 2025 |

Wondering what to expect from the government in 2025? So far, it looks like it will be more of the same ill-advised, costly, greedy, taxpayer-funded, dunderheaded power grabs, saber-rattling, graft, corruption, and make-works programming that leaves us no better off than where we started. Indeed, we’ve been down this road so many times before that there should be no surprise when, no matter who occupies the White House, we find ourselves subjected to more of the same when it comes to the...

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Why Jimmy Carter Pardoned Draft Resisters

Why Jimmy Carter Pardoned Draft Resisters

by | Jan 8, 2025 |

The passing of Jimmy Carter has been duly noted in ubiquitous remembrances and commentaries on his four-year presidency, 1977-1981. Carter is lauded more for his post-presidential humanitarian projects, while his presidency is deemed a mixed bag by left and right alike. For many Vietnam War resisters – myself included, it is more personal.  Jimmy Carter’s first act as president was to pardon draft resisters.  He then established a program for military deserters like me, who were able...

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Ukraine War Turns into Absurdist Fiction

Ukraine War Turns into Absurdist Fiction

by | Jan 8, 2025 |

ESTRAGON: Don’t touch me! Don’t question me! Don’t speak to me! Stay with me!VLADIMIR: Did I ever leave you? ESTRAGON: You let me go.— Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett One great transformation of the Ukraine war in the past year since the current Russian offensive began is its transition to an absurdist fiction devolving upon the existential insecurity of Europeans, their fear of being abandoned by Donald Trump and yet their desire to be left alone.  Overall, the above quote...

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Don’t Pardon Michael Byrd. Indict Him Instead.

Don’t Pardon Michael Byrd. Indict Him Instead.

by | Jan 7, 2025 |

The Washington, D.C., establishment is, needless to say, up in arms over President-elect Trump’s plans to pardon the protestors who stormed the Capitol on January 6 four years ago. After hundreds of criminal prosecutions and sometimes long jail sentences meted out by federal judges, Trump’s pardons will be upending not only the entire prosecution-and-conviction scheme but also the ludicrous official narrative that has been used to justify the prosecutions and sentences. The narrative states...

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