The United States government recently gave more than a million dollars to the family of one victim it had killed in one of its wars. The victim happened to be Italian. If you were to find all the Iraqi families with any surviving members who had loved ones killed by the United States it might be a million families. A million times a million dollars would be enough to treat those Iraqis in this respect as if they were Europeans. Who can tell me — raise your hand — how much is a million times a million?

That’s right, a trillion.

Now, can you count to a trillion starting from one. Go ahead. We’ll wait.

Actually we won’t wait, because if you counted one number per second you would get to a trillion in 31,709 years. And we have other speakers to get to here.

Maybe half a million dead, half a country — 10 million people — displaced from their homes, jettisoned onto the mercy of the world.

Welcome to war. Welcome to Syria.

This is a conflict apparently too complex to understand. The U.S. brokered a ceasefire with Russia, then proceeded to lead a bombing strike that killed 62 Syrian troops, injured another hundred — and gave tactical aid of ISIS. Later it apologized . . . uh, sort of.

“Russia really needs to stop the cheap point scoring and the grandstanding and the stunts and focus on what matters, which is implementation of something we negotiated in good faith with them.”

BY JESSE JACKSON
September 13, 2016

Are black voters so loyal to Democrats that their issues are ignored? Donald Trump suggests as much, arguing that blacks had “nothing to lose” by voting for him. Now a column by Farai Chideya at FiveThirtyEight cites academics who make a similar argument.

In recent elections, about 90 percent of the black vote has gone to Democrats. Chideya cites Professor Paul Frymer of Princeton, who argues that politicians focus their appeals on swing voters, particularly “moderate, disaffected whites in the middle — whether you call them soccer moms or NASCAR dads.”