Global
ake news” as a denunciation peddled by Republican and Trump apparatchiks is an old-fashioned, fascist-style Big Lie with a neat capitalist twist. The obvious lie is that most of the media, accused of reporting “fake news,” actually report real news – with real corrections when they get something wrong. This is the antithesis of the way the “conservative” con machine has operated for decades. Among the world’s shortest books would be “Setting the Record Straight by Republican Senators” or “The Collected Corrections of Donald Trump.” These are people whose common currency is falsehood rooted in deceit for the good of themselves and not much of anyone else, certainly not most of the people that they were elected to represent, wink-wink. Chronic right-wing lying is hardly a new phenomenon. Lies about FDR and the Red Menace live on long after the imaginary threats have passed into history.
And the word of the moment is . . . opportunity:
“What unites our party is a belief in opportunity, the idea that however you started out, whatever you look like, whoever you love, America is the place you can make it if you try.”
Could you be any more tepid? The words were those of the former president the other day, giving his blessing to the naming of Tom Perez as the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Perez is the safe, establishment choice to lead the party forward into the maelstrom of Trump, under a banner that seems garishly inoffensive: Tolerate our differences, give everyone a chance.
A rational and moral person might think of the recent U.S. raid in Yemen this way.
Sometimes the real world needs heroes. And sometimes those heroes need inspiration.
To anyone only passingly familiar with Captain America, it's easy to assume he's nothing more than the embodiment of blind patriotism. A muscled-up blond white man in stars and stripes, he looks like an American fascist's dream.
But Captain America was created to fight fascism in America’s name, and for that, he’s a perfect icon for the modern-day resistance.
The early days of the comic book industry were deeply rooted in New York City, so it's no surprise that most superheroes with a pedigree that old were created by the children of Jewish immigrants. Plenty of scholarly examinations of Superman have made a big deal of that aspect of that superhero’s creation. Though Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster started in Cleveland rather than New York, their experiences growing up in immigrant Jewish families influenced the creation of the ultimate immigrant character.
Sam Husseini just asked Nancy Pelosi why she won't support an impeachment investigation for Trump.
rump proposes to increase U.S. military spending by $54 billion, and to take that $54 billion out of the other portions of the above budget, including in particular, he says, foreign aid. If you can’t find foreign aid on the chart above, that’s because it is a portion of that little dark green slice called International Affairs. To take $54 billion out of foreign aid, you would have to cut foreign aid by approximately 200 percent.
Alternative math!
But let’s not focus on the $54 billion. The blue section above (in the 2015 budget) is already 54% of discretionary spending (that is, 54% of all the money that the U.S. government chooses what to do with every year). It’s already 60% if you add in Veterans’ Benefits. (We should take care of everyone, of course, but we wouldn’t have to take care of amputations and brain injuries from wars if we stopped having the wars.) Trump wants to shift another 5% to the military, boosting that total to 65%.
Now I’d like to show you a ski slope that Denmark is opening on the roof of a clean power plant — a clean power plant that cost 0.06% of Trump’s military budget.