Dennis Kucinich, a long-time advocate for the United States government pursing a peaceful foreign policy who served in the United States House of Representatives as a Democrat from Ohio and twice sought the Democratic Party presidential nomination, issued a statement on Friday in which he condemns the US government’s killing of Iranian General Qassim Suleimani and calls on Congress to prevent the development of a larger war.
Continue readingThis week, amid protests by people upset with United States intervention in Iraq, individuals forced their way into and damaged the US embassy compound in Baghdad. In response, US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper declared on Tuesday that 750 additional US troops would be deployed immediately to the Middle East, and it was reported that anonymous US officials said thousands more could be sent there soon.
Here is another option to consider: End US intervention and sanctions, along with the threat of both, that stir up resentment toward the US in Iraq and elsewhere. Announcing the relocating and major downsizing of the huge US embassy in Iraq would help show the US is serious about following through.
The United States Green Party issued a press release Thursday announcing it is seeking “to get ballot lines for all 50 states and DC and the U.S. territories in 2020.” This would be an improvement over the 2016 US general election. The press release states that the party had ballot access in 47 states then, with access in three of those states just for write-in votes.
Why can’t people just vote for Green Party candidates across the country? The answer is that many state governments have imposed special burdens, including the requirement of gathering many signatures from registered voters and submitting those signatures to the state governments, in order for third parties and their candidates to be included as options in voting booths.
On the United States House of Representatives floor today, representatives have lined up to speak in solemn tones about how they are fulfilling of their oaths of office and defending America from grave danger by voting to impeach President Donald Trump.
Continue readingAdvocacy for secession, both in America and abroad, is often scoffed at as unrealistic. Yet, far from an impossible goal, secession has happened much in history.
Continue readingSome American professional sports organizations, such as the National Football League (NFL) and Major League Baseball (MLB), have served as auxiliary enforcers of the United States government’s marijuana prohibition, testing players for marijuana use and imposing penalties on them if it is determined they have used marijuana. On Thursday, MLB, along with the Major League Baseball Players Association, announced a reversal of that policy for baseball players, starting with the 2020 spring training.
Continue readingJulian Assange of WikiLeaks has been silenced. Assange was prevented from communicating with the outside world in his final 13 months at the Ecuador embassy in London, where he had obtained sanctuary from extradition to the United States. The silencing has continued in a British prison where Assange has been detained pending extradition to the US since British police forcibly removed him from the embassy in April.
Similarly, communication by Chelsea Manning has been much curtailed after Manning reveled United States military secrets. First, Manning served seven years in United States military prison after being convicted for the leak. Released from prison in 2017, Manning has been condemned to jail for most of the time since March of this year for refusing to testify for a grand jury involved in the US government’s effort to prosecute Assange.
You may be concerned about Facebook and other companies restricting what may be communicated and who may communicate on the companies’ social media platforms, as well as those companies limiting the ability of people to easily see the posts of people and organizations they follow. The Intercept writer Mehdi Hasan is concerned about something else. He thinks Facebook is doing too little to suppress speech, especially speech critical of Islam and Muslim people.
Continue readingA Thursday Free Beacon article by Joe Schoffstall purports to expose Darius Khalil Gordon, a newly hired Bernie Sanders presidential campaign employee, as having “a history of racial slurs and denigrating remarks directed at gays, Jews, and women.” Some Twitter posts attributed to Gordon are presented in the article as evidence for this conclusion.
All the Gordon tweets but one included in the article are from a period in 2010 through 2012. Do they represent Gordon’s current thinking? It has been seven to nine years since he posted those tweets. It is even worth considering to what extent these years-old tweets ever really represented Gordon’s views.
Following up on his previous call for caution in the effort in the United States House of Representatives to impeach President Donald Trump, George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley on Wednesday presented to the House Judiciary Committee oral testimony and an extensive written statement regarding the case as it now stands for impeaching the president. Unlike other witnesses at the hearing, Turley did not give the deed his blessing.
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