Harry Targ – 05.19.13

My name is Assata Shakur, and I am a 20th century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate the US government’s policy toward people of color. I am an ex-political prisoner, and I have been living in exile in Cuba since 1984….

By Donald B. Ardell - 05.19.13

There are so many absurdities in our day-to-day political life related to religion. We have become inured to new standards of idiocy set by theocratic pols seeking to outdo each other sucking up to religious crazies.

The result of our collective hesitancy is that things keep getting worse. That is, the intrusion of religion in varied forms becomes more pervasive, and our drift toward theocracy increasingly pernicious.

By Mickey Walker-May 19, 2013

A cousin emailed me a while back about the horrible Obama administration and how it is running America into the ditch.  You know the drill:  deficit spending, worst record of new debt for any president in history, elaborate wasting of government resources like when Michelle Obama flies to Europe on shopping sprees courtesy of us taxpayers.  I find myself awash in a sea of mud and muck when it gets heaped on so thick that it is obvious that big money (on either side) is behind...

By Loren Adams, 12 May 2013

One of the most notorious events in political history is Watergate, which most of the world recognizes as a period where American democracy was more at risk than any other before or after. Ever since the burglary [followed by months of hearings and impeachment proceedings], almost every Washington scandal has been christened “gate” in its honor. The suffix expressly magnifies a poisonous classification – toxic enough to bring down any government or president.

But oft forgotten are the tentacles of Watergate – how the Republican Party was determined to win at any cost, commit treason to delay an end of the...

By Michael Faulkner – 05.12.13

“Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present, or at least in the process of formation.” Karl Marx (From Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859).

This optimistic claim made by Marx more than 150 years ago comes to mind when considering what is, without doubt, the biggest, most pressing question facing humankind today: is it still possible in the next...

By Iris Vander Pluym - 05.05.13

 “[A]ny degree of ‘flexibility’ about torture at the top drops down the chain of command like a stone — the rare exception fast becoming the rule.”
-Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar, former commandant of the Marine Corps and former commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, respectively.

The Constitution Project's Task Force on Detainee Treatment recently issued its report.

By Conn Hallinan on April 19, 2013

In the current crisis on the Korean Peninsula the Obama administration is virtually repeating the 2004 Bush playbook, one that derailed a successful diplomatic agreement forged by the Clinton administration to prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons? While the acute tensions of the past month appear to be receding— all of the parties involved seem to be taking a step back— the problem is not going to disappear and, unless Washington and its allies re-examine their strategy, another crisis is certain to develop.

By Steven Jonas MD, MPH on 05.05.13

The GOP and National Planning, you say? Hasn’t the GOP always been against planning, particularly against nation-wide planning to deal with nation-wide problems? Well, actually not always. In the immediate post-Civil War period the so-called “Radical” branch of what was then truly the Party of Lincoln was very much for national planning in dealing with the problem of how to integrate the freed slaves into the regular economic and political life of the nation. They proposed to start with three central programmatic elements: universal co-equal education,