Good summary statement from Rep. Magaziner on Trump war on Venezuela

Trump's ugly Thanksgiving meltdown

It's getting so bad that even Republicans are starting to notice.

Noah Berlatsky

Thanksgiving is supposedly a holiday devoted to welcoming family, friends, and guests to eat together. So of course, Trump used it to indulge in a bizarre orgy of xenophobia and hate, culminating in a gutter attack on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who he referred to as “seriously retarded.”

Trump’s decision to “give thanks” by spewing bigotry and slurs is not a surprise. Even by his standards, though, his harangue was despicable. It was also a disgusting effort to leverage for partisan ends the shooting of National Guard members in Washington DC.

As his popularity and influence slips, Trump seems more and more desperate. That makes him more reckless and in many ways more dangerous. It also opens up opportunities for opposition, though — sometimes from unexpected quarters.

Who did what in Afghanistan

Does Trump know New Orleans attacker was a US-born veteran?

NOT an immigrant, so shut up!

The Las Vegas cybertruck bomber was also a US-born veteran

Juan Cole in Informed Comment

I love New Orleans, and have been known to hit the jazz clubs on Bourbon Street into the wee hours myself. So what happened there is a gut punch, and I want to express my condolences to the families of the victims and to the community there for its trauma.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump jumped to the conclusion that the New Orleans attacker, who killed 15 people and wounded three dozen more was a career criminal and recent immigrant. In fact, he was an African-American veteran, born and bred in Beaumont, Texas. His conversion to Islam must have happened before 2004, when he tried to enlist in the Navy under that name. Instead, he ended up in the army, and deployed for a year to Afghanistan (2009-2010), as well as getting the training to become an IT specialist. He remained a reservist after his honorable discharge.

He was, in short, a patriotic American who did his part in fighting the war on terror. He was not an immigrant or a member of a foreign criminal gang.

That Mr. Trump persists in deploying the politics of hate and bigotry is a bad sign for the U.S. 

Even if Jabbar had been a immigrant, his actions would have said nothing about immigrants, who have low rates of criminality compared to the native-born population and whose productivity has been one key to American economic success. They don’t take jobs from the native-born on the whole, but do jobs that the latter typically won’t do.

Nor is Jabbar’s religion a reason to engage in Muslim-hatred. The NY Post‘s insidious and Islamophobic reporting ominously says that one of his neighbors in the trailer park in which he ended up only spoke Urdu. If that were true it would be because poor people live in trailer parks, including immigrants with limited English. However, it sounds fishy to me, since even poor Pakistanis of the sort who come to the United States tend to know English. It was the colonial language and still an essential language, like French in Tunisia. Then they say ominously that there was a mosque in the area. So what? Mosques are houses of worship where people go for solace when facing rough times.

Jimmy Carter’s human rights focus helped dismantle the Soviet Union

A century of service

Robert C. Donnelly, Gonzaga University

Former President Jimmy Carter, who died on Dec. 29, 2024, at age 100 at his home in Plains, Georgia, was a dark horse Democratic presidential candidate with little national recognition when he beat Republican incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976.

The introspective former peanut farmer pledged a new era of honesty and forthrightness at home and abroad, a promise that resonated with voters eager for change following the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War.

His presidency, however, lasted only one term before Ronald Reagan defeated him. Since then, scholars have debated – and often maligned – Carter’s legacy, especially his foreign policy efforts that revolved around human rights.

Critics have described Carter’s foreign policies as “ineffectual” and “hopelessly muddled,” and their formulation demonstrated “weakness and indecision.”

As a historian researching Carter’s foreign policy initiatives, I conclude his overseas policies were far more effective than critics have claimed.

President Jimmy Carter listens to Sen. Joseph R. Biden, D-Del.,
 as they wait to speak at fund raising reception in Wilmington,
Del. on Feb. 20, 1978. AP Photo/Barry Thumma, File

EDITOR'S PERSONAL NOTE: In 1978, I was offered a job in Washington to work at the Legal Services Corp. Cathy and I went down to DC to talk about what we should do. We were sitting in the rooftop restaurant of the Hotel Washington overlooking the White House when Jimmy Carter's motorcade returned to the White House from the signing of the Camp David accords. I looked at Cathy and said, "Yeah, we could get used to this." She nodded and we spent most of the rest of our careers in DC returning to live in Charlestown in 2002. Thank you, Mr. President, for the inspiration.     - Will Collette

Trump campaign violated rules in Arlington National Cemetery visit, cemetery legal expert explains

By any normal standard of decency - or law - this is wrong

Tanya D. Marsh, Wake Forest University

One of the photos Donald Trump’s campaign shared of his visit to Arlington National Cemetery on Aug. 26, 2024. X.com/GovCox

Signs like this greet visitors to Arlington
National Cemetery. 
Mark Reinstein/Corbis via Getty Images

The public furor continues over Donald Trump’s behavior during a visit to Arlington National Cemetery on Aug. 26, 2024.

Since that visit to the U.S. military burial ground outside Washington, D.C., news reports and campaign photos have emerged showing the former president grinning widely and giving a “thumbs-up” gesture while standing behind the grave of an American serviceman killed during the 2021 U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan. 

Visible in those images, too, are the graves of two U.S. Army Green Berets.

The Trump campaign later released video showing images of him in Arlington National Cemetery with audio criticizing the Biden administration for its handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Trump’s politicking and seemingly cavalier demeanor at a site marked by signs declaring itself “America’s most sacred shrine” have spurred many critical commentaries in the media, including from former military leaders.

For his part, Trump complained on Truth Social on Sept. 3, 2024, that reports of the incident were a “made up story by Comrade Kamala and her misinformation squad.” 

His campaign staff says it had permission from the family of one soldier buried at Arlington to take photos and video in the cemetery.

But as a legal scholar specializing in cemetery law, I know that their permission is irrelevant. They are not cemetery officials. The law allows cemeteries to make their own rules.

And Arlington National Cemetery has, by far, the strictest rules of any cemetery in the United States. 

It is clear to me that the actions of Trump and his campaign staff were outside the rules of a place that orders visitors to “conduct yourselves with dignity and respect at all times.”

Republicans keep wasting our money on their ideological boondoggles

Americans Pay a High Price for the GOP's Fiscal Irresponsibility

DAN BROOK for Common Dreams

The GOP is fiscally irresponsible in all sorts of ways.

Republicans are worse for the economy overall, worse for gross domestic product, worse for the budget deficit and national debt, worse for the trade deficit, worse for job growth, worse for wage increases, worse for inequality, worse for the stock market, and worse for much else.

No modern Republican president has ever reduced the deficit in any year with any budget. Every Republican president raised the federal budget deficit by overspending wildly on the military, the wealthy, and other wasteful things that don't constructively add to our economy or society.

The only three modern presidents to reduce the budget deficit have been Bill Clinton (who eliminated it and created a surplus), Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, all Democrats.

• About three-fourths of the entire national debt was accrued under Republican borrow-and-spend presidents.
• Republicans run higher trade deficits than Democrats.
• Unemployment is higher under Republican administrations
• The stock market does worse under Republican administrations, on average.
• Most recessions have begun under Republican administrations, as did the Great Depression.

None of the tax cuts for the rich and corporations that Republicans said would pay for themselves wound up paying for themselves. Instead, they made the wealthy wealthier. 

Joe's record

Life as a battlefield

In some U.S. zip codes, young men face more risk of firearm death than those deployed in recent wars

Brown University

The risk of firearm death in the U.S. is on the rise: in 2020, firearms became the leading cause of death for children, adolescents and young adults. 

Yet the risk is far from even — young men in some U.S. zip codes face disproportionately higher risks of firearm-related injuries and deaths.

To better understand the magnitude of the gun violence crisis and put it in perspective, researchers at Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania compared the risk of firearm-related death for young adult men living in the most violent areas in four major U.S. cities with the risks of combat death and injury faced by U.S. military personnel who served in Afghanistan and Iraq during active periods of war.

The results were mixed: The study, published in JAMA Network Open, found that young men from zip codes with the most firearm violence in Chicago and Philadelphia faced a notably higher risk of firearm-related death than U.S. military personnel deployed to wartime service in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the opposite was true in two other cities: The most violent areas in New York and Los Angeles were associated with much less risk for young men than those in the two wars.

In all zip codes studied, risks were overwhelmingly borne by young men from minority racial and ethnic groups, the study found.

Yeah, let's ask the panel of experts

For more cartoons by Ted Rall, CLICK HERE.

 

That was then, this is now

 

Estimated Cost of Post-9/11 US Wars Hits $8 Trillion With Nearly a Million People Dead

"What have we truly accomplished in 20 years of post 9/11 wars, and at what price?"

JON QUEALLY for Common Dreams

With the final U.S. soldiers leaving Afghanistan after nearly 20 years of occupation and war, a new analysis released September 1 shows the United States will ultimately spend upwards of $8 trillion and that nearly one million people have lost their lives so far in the so-called "global war on terror" that was launched after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

According to Brown University's Costs of War Project, which has been releasing reports on the financial and human costs of the post-9/11 wars at regular intervals since 2010, the total cost of the war and military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and elsewhere over the last two decades have directly killed at least 897,000 to 929,000 people—an estimate the researchers say is conservative.

Texas sharia

 

Teaching them a lesson

 

Afghanistan only the latest US war to be driven by deceit and delusion

We have made a habit of it 

Gordon Adams, American University School of International Service

On Aug. 16, 2021, thousands of Afghans trapped by the sudden Taliban
takeover rushed the Kabul airport tarmac. AP Photo/Shekib Rahmani

In Afghanistan, American hubris – the United States’ capacity for self-delusion and official lying – has struck once again, as it has repeatedly for the last 60 years.

This weakness-masquerading-as-strength has repeatedly led the country into failed foreign interventions. The pattern first became clear to me when I learned on Nov. 11, 1963, that the U.S. embassy and intelligence agencies had been directly involved in planning a coup to depose the president of South Vietnam and his brother, leading to their executions.

I was a Fulbright Fellow, starting a long career in national security policymaking and teaching, studying in Europe. On that day, I was in a bus on a tour of the battlefields of Ypres, Belgium, led by a French history professor.

As I watched the grave markers sweep by, I was reading a report in Le Monde exposing this U.S. effort to overthrow another government and I thought, “This is a bad idea; my country should not be doing this.” And the war, in which the U.S. was directly involved for 20 years, marched on.

The American people were told we had no hand in that coup. We did not know that was a lie until The New York Times and Washington Post published the Pentagon Papers in 1971. By then, 58,000 Americans and possibly as many as 3.5 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians had died – and the goal of preventing the unification of Vietnam had died as well.

For 15 years, the American foreign policy establishment struggled to overcome what it called the “Vietnam Syndrome” – the rational reluctance of the American people to invade and try to remake another country.

American hubris reemerged, this time as “the global war on terror.” Afghanistan is now the poster child for the sense that the U.S. can remake the world.

American Taliban

By Kevin Necessary

 

Afghanistan analyzed by experts

 

For more cartoons by Tom Tomorrow, CLICK HERE.

Meanwhile, not in Afghanistan

 

They'll drink to that

By Matt Davies

 

The Afghan War was lost the day George W. Bush ordered the US to invade

When Will We Stop Letting Our Presidents Lie America Into Wars?

By Thom Hartmann for the Independent Media Institute

Let’s never forget that what we are watching happen right now in Afghanistan is the final act of George W. Bush‘s 2004 reelection strategy. 

After 9/11 the Taliban offered to arrest Bin Laden, but Bush turned them down because he wanted to be a “wartime president” to have a “successful presidency.” 

The Washington Post headline weeks after 9/11 put it succinctly: “Bush Rejects Taliban Offer On Bin Laden.” With that decision not to arrest and try Bin Laden for his crime but instead to go to war George W. Bush set the US and Afghanistan on a direct path to today.

More recently, Trump and Pompeo gave the Taliban everything they wanted — power, legitimacy and the release of 5000 of their worst war criminals — over the strong objections of the Afghan government in 2019 so Trump could falsely claim, heading into the 2020 election, that he’d “negotiated peace” in Afghanistan when in fact he’d set up this week’s debacle.

Trump also released 5000 Taliban prisoners including
their leader who now runs Afghanistan

”The relationship I have with the Mullah is very good,” Trump proclaimed after ordering the mullah who yesterday named himself President freed from prison over the furious objection of Afghan’s government, who Trump had cut out of the negotiations.

Now Trump and the GOP are scrubbing the record of that betrayal of both America and Afghanistan and embrace of the Taliban from their websites, as noted here and here. 

And the UK is coming right out and saying that Trump’s “rushed” deal with the Taliban — without involvement of the Afghan government or the international community — set up this disaster. “The die was cast,” Defense Minister Ben Wallace told the BBC, “when the deal was done by Donald Trump, if you want my observation.”

Trump’s sabotage notwithstanding, President Biden, the State Department and the Pentagon should have anticipated this week’s debacle in Afghanistan. 

The fact that they didn’t speaks volumes about how four administrations, the Pentagon and our defense contractors covered up how poorly the Ashraf Ghani government was doing there. Just like they did with Vietnam. It’s on all of them.

And this isn’t the first time a president has lied us into a war.  

• Vietnam wasn’t the first time an American president and his buddies in the media lied us into a war when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara falsely claimed that an American warship had come under attack in the Gulf of Tonkin and LBJ went along with the lie.  
• Neither was President William McKinley lying us into the Spanish-American war in 1898 by falsely claiming that the USS Maine had been blown up in Havana harbor (it caught fire all by itself). 
• The first time we were lied into a major war by a president was probably the Mexican-American war of 1846 when President James Polk lied that we’d been invaded by Mexico. Even Abraham Lincoln, then a congressman from Illinois, called him out on that lie. 
• You could also argue that when President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 leading to the Trail of Tears slaughter and forced relocation of the Cherokee under President Buchanan (among other atrocities) it was all based on a series of lies.

Bush’s lies that took us into Afghanistan and, a bit over a year later into Iraq, are particularly egregious, however, given his and Cheney’s apparent reasons for those lies.