As the Spanish government reveals the true nature of its “democratic” pretensions, injuring hundreds in an effort to stop Catalans from voting, one thing is clear: Catalonia is no longer Spanish. In the very effort to prevent the referendum Madrid has handed the...
The laziness of journalists is legendary. Especially these days, when the line between journalist and propagandist has been blurred, the many ways in which these scribblers take shortcuts and otherwise seek to make their jobs less strenuous have been greatly...
Having some medical problems today, so my regular Monday column is unfortunately canceled. However, I’ll be back, so stay tuned. NOTES IN THE MARGIN You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative,...
What will go down in history as the “Rocket man” speech underscores the confusion, the contradictions, the dangers, and even some of the virtues – however attenuated – of the Trump presidency. Despite the flamboyant rhetoric – or, perhaps, because of it – it’s hard to...
One of those crises that no one saw coming is about to rear its head in a very unlikely locale: Catalonia, Spain’s richest province, where the local government has scheduled an independence referendum on October 1. Of course, some observers – e,g, Julian Assange...
Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has learned his lesson, and it is this: it’s better to be bold. He’s exchanged the mealy-mouthed equivocations of his ill-fated presidential run – when he actually met with Bill Kristol, presumably to negotiate getting a break from his...
Sixteen years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we still don’t know what happened. How did a ragtag bunch of hijackers, armed only with box cutters, manage to gain control of those airliners? How did they get into the United...
How Nikki Haley got her job as UN ambassador, and a major foreign policy spokesperson for the Trump administration, is a mystery, at least to me. Her vicious personal attacks on Trump when he was a candidate should’ve ruled her out from the get-go. Where oh where is...
The latest North Korea nuclear test coincides with leaks from the Trump administration that Washington is demanding renegotiation of the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS), and is preparing to withdraw from it – and therein lies a possible, albeit unintentional,...
After 16 years of writing about it, I thought I knew a lot about the war in Afghanistan, but Scott Horton’s new book, Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, showed me how much I didn’t know – and that’s quite a bit. Did you know that the Taliban tried...
