By John Lasker —A PTSD victim looks for a day when the Army will reform the “boys’ club” atmosphere that makes women soldiers a target for sexual abuse.
Life for most of us can be carefully—if unintentionally—structured to avoid confrontation with the sea of human misery, despair and hopelessness around us. Whatever his intention, British photographer Lee Jeffries is interrupting the arrangement.
This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: The great Internet switch-off; the ACLU vs. jailhouse abuse; S&P’s downgrade mania; Robert Scheer on the election, and Chris Hedges discusses his lawsuit against the president.
My first reaction to the video released recently of the four U.S. Marines urinating on the bodies of dead Afghans was that it was too ham-fisted and bombastic a metaphor to add anything of real value to the ongoing critique and analysis of this country’s über-mortiferous foreign policy.
Art Spiegelman’s “MetaMaus” is a 300-page user’s guide to his own Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus” (you know, Holocaust-graphic-novel-Jews-as-mice-Nazis-as-cats).
Did you see the one about the Bulgarian street artists who used a little color to repurpose a public monument commemorating the Soviet takeover of their country in 1944 into a cartoonish visual joke?
We can vote for Romney or Obama, but Goldman Sachs and ExxonMobil and Bank of America and the defense contractors always win. However, the iron grip of corporations over our lives will, eventually, be broken.
A PTSD victim looks for a day when the Army will reform the “boys’ club” atmosphere that makes women soldiers a target for discrimination, harassment and rape.
Sunday marks the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, but the big news this year is the debate over the 1965 decision of Griswold v. Connecticut that made contraception legal.
Given time and enough money, the super PACs and other secretive political campaign funds are capable of causing corruptive influence that could reach from the presidency down to the lowest ranked members of the House.
Throughout our decade-long foreign policy debacle in the Greater Middle East, we in the U.S. have generally agreed that no one shall commit the gaucherie of dwelling on civilian casualties. Club rules do, however, permit one loophole: Washington officials may bemoan the nightmare of civilian casualties if they can be pinned on a 24-year-old Army private first class named Bradley Manning.
Sure, there’s the GOP symbol, but the real elephant in the room has been the super PAC, the turbocharged political action committee able to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on political ads — as long as that spending isn’t coordinated with a particular campaign.
Late last year, President Obama pulled a fast one by changing his stance on the National Defense Authorization Act so suddenly and drastically that Americans were left with a bad case of legislative whiplash—and a very serious state of affairs with regard to our civil liberties.
Scary to think that the implication behind the Supreme Court’s ruling, which came down on Monday, that police and other law enforcement agents would need a warrant to plant GPS tracking devices on suspects’ vehicles is that this kind of bugging was obviously happening before without that key intermediary step. Score one for the Fourth Amendment.
One senatorial vote stands between Washington state and gay marriage. Five legislators remain undecided. With a view to tipping the scales, Seattle’s Stranger newspaper has cataloged their indecision, complete with contact info for readers interested in giving them a lean.
A group of doctors and environmentalists in Salt Lake City have joined the Occupy movement to sue the third-largest mining corporation in the world for allegedly violating the Clean Air Act with practices that contribute to thousands of pollution-related deaths in Utah each year. The company, Rio Tinto/Kennecott, pulled in a record $15 billion in profits last year.
Egypt’s parliamentary election results are in. Candidates from Islamist parties—the Freedom and Justice and Al-Nour—took two-thirds of the 478 seats, which means they will have a large say in determining the country’s new constitution. Revolutionary groups led by those who played a pivotal role in toppling Hosni Mubarak took only seven seats.
What a week for Mitt Romney. He’s gone from obvious nominee to the man who just can’t catch a break. First a recount snatched his win in Iowa, then Newt Gingrich debated his way to an upset in South Carolina (this despite a sex scandal that might have condemned a more conventional candidacy).
More than 150 people are dead after bombs ripped through police stations and other targets and gunbattles erupted in the Nigerian city of Kano and elsewhere in the region on Friday. A militant Islamist group called Boko Haram claimed responsibility for the attacks, which it said were in retaliation for the capture, detention and death of its members in police custody.
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords Explains Why She’s Resigning From Congress
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