Global

News gets more bizarre every week. It was revealed that Mohammad (Kushner)
Bin Salman has spent a billion dollars to buy a home in France and one
Leonardo da Vinci painting and another half trillion dollars buying weapons from
US Corporations (whose only use will be to kill more Yemeni civilians).
More bizarre for me was that Mahmoud Abbas dutifully condemned the rocket
fired from Yemen in self-defense after Saudi Jets have dropped tons of US
and British bombs on Yemeni cities. Then we hear the Zionist puppets
Nimrata Randhawa (who changed her name to Nicki Haley) and the (orange)
bully Trump threaten countries who were about to vote at the UN based in
support of international law (which says Israel is an occupying power in
Jerusalem). Despite these bizarre threats, 128 countries voted with, 9
against, and 35 (shamefully) abstained (those who did not vote with
international law should be held accountable by their people so please
check how your country voted and challenge them). Nimrata and the Orange
puppets were really angry!! Their bosses in Tel Aviv were acting their

n December 6, a majority of Democrats in the House joined all House Republicans in voting to prevent the House of Representatives from even debating articles of impeachment against President Trump. The House voted 364-58 (with 10 non-votes) to table impeachment articles (H RES 646) sponsored by Texas Democrat Al Green. Over the strong objections of Democratic leaders (an oxymoron), Green had brought his impeachment resolution to a vote by invoking his personal privilege as a House member. Green’s resolution began:

The most recent claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “running” Donald Trump as if the U.S. president is a Russian intelligence asset comes from former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper. “[Putin] knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he’s doing with the president,” Clapper told CNN last Monday. 

Clapper, who served as DNI under President Barack Obama, and who has repeatedly disparaged Trump both before and since the 2016 election, called the Russian president a “great case officer,” which might be the only nice thing said about Putin by a former senior U.S. official in quite some time. 

Clapper was asked by CNN’s Jim Sciutto, “You’re saying that Russia is handling President Trump as an asset?” He responded “That seems to be... that’s the appearance to me.” Later in the conversation, Clapper backtracked slightly, clarifying his remarks by adding “I’m saying this figuratively.” 

The unfortunate Donald Trump Administration decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel serves no visible American interest, in spite of what some of the always-loyal-to-Israel punditry has been suggesting. Israel is already moving to exploit the situation in its usual fashion. Immediately after the announcement was made, Israeli Ambassador in Washington Ron Dermer suggested that the decision on Jerusalem could now be extended to include other disputed areas, most particularly Syria’s Golan Heights that were occupied in 1967. And the decision on Jerusalem itself will quite likely prove elastic as the Israeli government has already prepared legislation to incorporate large chunks of settlements into the city limits, far beyond the historic boundaries.

Al Franken the serial groper. Al Franken the scapegoat.

History proceeds clumsily. Innocent people — or “innocently guilty” people, like the junior senator from Minnesota — often get unfairly hung out to dry. Should he have to resign? As far as I can tell, his alleged sexual wrongdoings over the years consist of three butt grabs, several uninvited kisses, a breast grope and a waist squeeze.

There may be more, of course, and they add up to something beyond what could be called innocent mistakes or misunderstandings. An adolescent sense of entitlement seems to be at work here, but . . . this is the moral standard of a Congress open for purchase by corporate lobbyists? Who among us (Roy? Donald?) hasn’t committed transgressions worse than the above? And shouldn’t a person’s positive achievements be factored into the severity of his punishment, at least when no permanent damage has occurred?

Yet . . . yet . . .

Taylor Dunne and Eric Stewart’s forthcoming documentary “Off country” examines the devastating, still-lingering effects of atomic bomb testing on the communities around the White Sands missile range in New Mexico, the Nevada Test Site and the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado, where plutonium triggers were manufactured until its 1992 shutdown (the latter facility was studied in the galling 1982 documentary “Dark Circle,” which probed into the various deadly illnesses and deformities plaguing nearby residents whose complaints had been shunned by authorities). Everyone knows about the horrors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in August 1945. Far less discussed are the 40,000 Hispanic and Native American peoples who lived within eight miles of the White Sands site, an area that officials believed no one lived in, and where those very bombs were tested, a month earlier.

Movie critics are already hailing “The Post,” directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. Millions of people will see the film in early winter. But the real-life political story of Graham and her newspaper is not a narrative that’s headed to the multiplexes.

“The Post” comes 20 years after Graham’s autobiography Personal History appeared and won enormous praise. Read as a memoir, the book is a poignant account of Graham’s long quest to overcome sexism, learn the newspaper business and gain self-esteem. Read as media history, however, it is deceptive.

"I don’t believe that whom I was or wasn’t friends with interfered with our reporting at any of our publications," Graham wrote. However, Robert Parry -- who was a Washington correspondent for Newsweek during the last three years of the 1980s -- has shed some light on the shadows of Graham’s reassuring prose. Contrary to the claims in her book, Parry said he witnessed "self-censorship because of the coziness between Post-Newsweek executives and senior national security figures."

I’ve known Jill Stein for years. I knew weeks ago that the Senate “Intelligence” Committee was coming after her.

Twenty-Seven psychiatrists and mental health experts have produced a book called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, which I think, despite stating that the fate of the world is in the hands of an evil madman, understates the danger.

The case that these authors make is one that I believe would strike most readers not loyal to Trump as common sense. The evidence that they compile, and with which we’re mostly already familiar, strongly supports their diagnosis of Trump as hedonistic, narcissistic, bullying, dehumanizing, lying, misogynistic, paranoid, racist, self-aggrandizing, entitled, exploiting, empathy-impaired, unable to trust, free of guilt, manipulative, delusional, likely senile, and overtly sadistic. They also describe the tendency of some of these traits to grow ever worse through reinforcing cycles that seem to be underway. People, they suggest, who grow addicted to feeling special, and who indulge in paranoia can create circumstances for themselves that cause them to increase these tendencies.