Watching Fox News’s recent coverage of the Islamic State’s Twitter-hack left me shaking my head in disbelief, as usual. The latest act alleged to have been carried out by IS is the group’s takeover of several Twitter accounts belonging to the wives of US military servicemen. Among the threatening tweets issued by IS through the hacked…

“Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen,” Adam Smith noted in The Wealth of Nations, “its counsellors are always the masters.” US president Barack Obama reaffirms this insight with his intervention in the dispute between shipping industry employers and longshore workers on the west coast. That intervention comes at the behest of…

A pesar de lo que algunos piensan, héroe no es sinónimo de competente asesino a sueldo contratado por el gobierno. Si American Sniper, la exitosísima película de Clint Eastwood, provoca una franca conversación pública sobre la guerra y el heroísmo, el gran director habrá prestado un servicio muy necesario al país y el mundo. Esto…

“Hardline House GOP conservatives aren’t worried about a looming Department of Homeland Security shutdown,” reports Cristina Marcos at The Hill. They’d rather let DHS’s funding lapse than give up a provision in its new appropriation reversing president Barack Obama’s recent executive orders on immigration. Is it just me, or does this sound more like the promise of ice…

Usually when we see right-wing commentary on the upper-middle-class (“NPR/limousine/Whole Foods liberals,” “boho bougies,” or take your pick of other trendy labels), it’s a fake populist attack on their “cultural elite” tastes like brown mustard or wind-surfing, to divert attention from genuine populist attacks on the super-rich. So I guess it’s a sort of man-bites-dog…

“The so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL),” writes US president Barack Obama in his letter to Congress of February 11, “poses a threat to the people and stability of Iraq, Syria, and the broader Middle East, and to U.S. national security.” Therefore, Obama requests that Congress pass an “Authorization for the Use of…

“Forward, the Light Brigade!” Was there a man dismay’d? Not tho’ the soldier knew Someone had blunder’d: Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die: Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson The reason for the…

The prospect of compulsory vaccination (“Should Obama make vaccines mandatory for all children,” Dr. Manny Alvarez, Fox News, January 30) should trouble even those who think the practice can be defended in principle as a kind of self-defense. The burgeoning women’s liberation movement of the 1960s emphasized a theme with a prominent American pedigree, powerfully expressed…

On February 6, an exceptional documentary about the unacknowledged whistleblowing group The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, 1971, previously only screened at festivals, is beginning a limited theatrical run at New York City’s Cinema Village. As of this writing, there are limited engagements planned in Santa Fe, Portland (Oregon), Los Angeles, Bellingham, Columbus, and internationally in…

It’s frustrating to hear US president Barack Obama receive kudos from the beer community simply because of his fondness for the beverage. Between his 2009 Beer Summit, his occasional beer in public, and his recent quip that he’s the first president to brew beer at the White House since George Washington, Obama has successfully cultivated a…

On February 4, American media trumpeted the expected, “dog bites man” headline: “Ross Ulbricht Convicted” of being Dread Pirate Roberts, operator of the online Silk Road marketplace. Few expected an acquittal. From the moment US Attorney Preet Bharara announced Ulbricht’s indictment on seven charges, ranging from “money laundering” to “drug trafficking,” the prosecution ran on rails. A…

New corporate enclosures, looting and monopolies are springing up all over the place these days. Watching the news is a lot like watching Robocop or Blade Runner, what with stuff like Detroit’s “Emergency Manager” auctioning off local assets to corporate cronies the same way Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority did in Iraq. Given all that,…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Thomas L. Knapp‘s “Shutdown Theater (Off-Off Broadway Follies)” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. When even “progressive” Democrats like Elizabeth Warren threaten “shutdown” to get their way, it’s just too obvious that there’s no real shutdown in play. Per Chekhov, “[i]f you say in the first chapter that there is a…

On January 30, two-time Republican Party presidential hopeful Mitt Romney nixed a third go-around, telling supporters via teleconference that he can better serve America by supporting whomever the party chooses as its 2016 presidential nominee. Hallelujah. A third Romney candidacy would have been difficult to stomach. Romney had floated a trial balloon of making “helping the poor”…

On November 20, 2014, president Barack Obama announced a series of executive orders reforming the US immigration system. His plan of action consists not so much of improvements as of acceptance of the system’s failures and a doubling down on those failures. The plan’s key elements include increasing border security, deporting felons (“instead of families,” notes whitehouse.gov), criminal…

Journalist Barrett Brown, a woman who wanted to become a member of ISIS and a rapper named Tiny Doo. Not a list of people that seem to fit together in many ways ordinarily but here’s the rub: Each will be spending portions of his or her life in prison. Brown is guilty of, as he puts…

If America has any characteristic that does not so much define it as it is, but defines it as it aspires to be, it’s offering upward mobility. Class struggle which gets anyone anywhere could be understood as meritocracy against a permanent oligarchy. Beginning with the rise of the merchant class and ending with the rise…

In late January, the US military-industrial complex reported results for 2014’s fourth quarter and expectations for 2015. Good times! Northrop Grumman knocked down nearly $6 billion in Q4 2014 and expects 2015 sales of around $23.5 billion. Raytheon did about as well last fall and expects a big radar order from the Air Force this year. Meanwhile the…

As Loretta Lynch’s US Senate confirmation hearings for her nomination to the office of Attorney General opened on January 28, Republicans were dying to ask her just how friendly she might be to the class of people government defines as “illegal aliens.” In an exchange with immigration scrooge Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Sessions wondered who Lynch believes has the…

In a recent speech Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal announced “… we came to America to be Americans. Not Indian-Americans, simply Americans. … If we wanted to be Indians, we would have stayed in India” (The Hindu, January 16). He also argued that it’s entirely reasonable for nations to discriminate between would-be immigrants based on whether they…