Global

“Lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. Boy, you think our country’s so innocent? You think our country’s so innocent?”

We have carnage and we have irony.

The speaker is the president, of course. It’s Super Bowl Sunday and here he is, generating another eyeball-popping headline as he dares to compare American collateral damage over the years with (as a chorus of shocked critics exclaimed) Vladimir Putin’s remorseless homicides. This happened during a pre-Super Bowl interview with Bill O’Reilly last Sunday, after O’Reilly had challenged Trump’s coziness with Russia and called Putin a killer.

he levels of duplicity in the opening paragraph of this White House statement are impressive. Acting Attorney General Sally Yates was appointed to that position at the request of the Trump administration, for the express purpose of serving only until the confirmation of the Trump appointee for Attorney General.

When it comes to understanding wars, for some people, a picture of the dead or of the injured or of the traumatized or of those made refugees can be worth ten million words. And, for at least some of us, a picture of where war is in the world can be worth at least a thousand.

The last time Nancy Pelosi took impeachment off the proverbial table was 10 years ago. At that time, I reported on an unusual incident:

Stage set: a dining room at left, an office at right

A woman enters the office where the phone is ringing. She answers it.

NP: Hello? Why do you ask? Yes, I'm sure. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Impeachment is off the table. Now let me tell you about some new legislative proposals that I think you're really going to like. I'll give you what we're going to pass in the first hundred seconds and in the first hundred months. Which one do you want first? Let's start with…

The woman's voice lowers but continues as lights go up in the dining room, where we see a cat jump off the table and wander into the office where the woman is hanging up the phone.

NP: Where were you sweetie? Was I ignoring you? Come here kitty kitty. I didn't mean to ignore you.

The phone rings. The cat leaves.

NP: Hello? Yes, this is Nancy Pelosi. Yes, I know, but an investigation investigates. It doesn't impeach. I've said it before and I'll say it again – Will you excuse me a second?

It was bound to be the case that if a U.S. president ever admitted that the United States murdered people and did so on a scale at least as significant as other countries, he would be defending the practice, not denouncing it.

It is not a secret in much of the world that the United States is (as that Putin stooge Martin Luther King Jr. put it) the greatest purveyor of violence on earth. The United States is the top weapons dealer, the top weapons buyer, the biggest military spender, the most widespread imperial presence, the most frequent war maker, the most prolific overthrower of governments, and from 1945 to 2017 the killer of the most people through war.

During this past U.S. election, a debate moderator asked if a candidate would be willing to kill thousands of innocent children as part of basic presidential duties. One can find many faults in Russia and other countries, but in none could one find such an occurrence.

I ask people at public events where I speak to name eight countries bombed under president Barack Obama, and most cannot come close. Nowhere else on earth can people not keep track of their wars.

A Georgetown Law professor named David Koplow has drafted what he calls a Nuclear Kellogg-Briand Pact.

When Rachel Maddow finished a 26-minute monologue that spanned two segments on her MSNBC program last Thursday night, her grave tones indicated that she thought she’d just delivered a whale of a story. But actually it was more like minnow -- and a specious one at that.

Convoluted and labored, Maddow’s narrative tried to make major hay out of a report from Moscow that a high-ranking Russian intelligence official had been dragged out of a meeting, arrested and charged with treason. Weirdly, Maddow kept presenting that barebones story as verification that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had directly ordered the hacking and release of Democratic campaign emails in order to get Donald Trump elected president.

It was a free-associating performance worthy of Glenn Beck at a whiteboard. Maddow swirled together an array of facts, possible facts, dubious assertions and pure speculation to arrive at conclusions that were based on little more than her zeal to portray Trump as a tool of the Kremlin. Even when sober, Joe McCarthy never did it better.

With two pen strokes, and just days into his administration, President
Donald Trump has already signed two executive orders signaling his intent
to be the most immigrant-hostile president in more than a generation.

Now, some may think the true impact of Trump's policies will be felt in
far-off lands. And it's true: The lives of many who dreamed of coming to
this country have been deeply disrupted.

But if you are a mayor like me, you know that many of the hardest hit
communities will be in cities and towns all over this country. Places like
Santa Fe, with the highest proportion of new immigrants in its region and
a vibrant culture and thriving economy, are a living testament to the
rewards a community can reap if it opens its doors.

For 400 years, Santa Fe has seen the benefit of being a welcoming
community. Immigrants in our city are business owners, children attending
our schools, artists contributing to our culture and economy, veterans who
served our country in uniform, and hard-working people on whom local
businesses rely.

ow Donald Trump is a war criminal just like his predecessors. That didn’t take long. Over the inaugural weekend, while the president was obsessing about the size of his crowd, his government also let loose two drone strikes against defenseless Yemen, reportedly killing an estimated 10 people, some of whom could possibly have been terrorists about to strike somewhere in Yemen. Three of these people were on a motorcycle hit by one drone, the other seven were in a vehicle hit by the other drone.

The United States is not formally at war with Yemen but strikes the country with drones whenever it feels like it. The U.S. also maintains a naval blockade of Yemen, contributing to near-famine in the region’s poorest country, which has never been able to produce enough food to feed its 25 million people. And since March 2015, the U.S. has supported and participated in the undeclared, illegal war of aggression launched by Saudi Arabia and its allies with U.S. blessings.