If anyone in America earned the right to stand tall and express himself forthrightly, it is someone who served for many years and retired.

Wait until Trump and his gang...for that is what an American military officer becomes when it follows illegal orders, take over Greenland and absolutely wreck NATO.

You elect a fascist to run your democracy, don't be surprised if along the way during his Presidency he takes a wild turn to the insane...and being a world class grifter, make a million stops along the way to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor.

A few big powers rule our lives, and probably our futures, if we have any. At the top of the list is "big oil", they are the ones, I am sure, who grease the Trump gang's palms with enough wealth to have them try to destroy wind and wave and solar power so greenhouse gas producing oil dominates the energy outlook.

Ethnic cleansing is always a part of apartheid, think Bantustan, which were the "homelands" that the whites in South Africa established, on inferior land, sort of like the "reservations" that our racist forefathers set up during our own ethnic cleansing to steal Native American land.
Israel is, first and foremost, an apartheid nation and will do everything it can to destroy even the concept of "Palestine". That is what it means to be a Zionist these days under Netanyahu, so why lie about it.

How is it not murder to kill people in a foreign land just to steal their leader, and along the way, to steal their oil? Yes, Maduro is a terrible person, but still...

Works for Trump/Putin, because it weakens NATO, which is essential for Putin. We are led by a Mad King, who is enthralled with the idea of total dictatorship for both him, and the other Mad King...Putin.

Both James Mattis, Trump's first term Secretary of Defense, and John Kelly, Trump's former Chief of Staff, said that Trump was fascist to his core.
And so we elected him again. Fascists rarely just leave power and head to the country to raise chickens and flowers.
We are clearly now a fascist nation, just as Russia is a fascist nation, just like North Korea.
We went into Iraq to steal oil, we went into Venezuela to steal oil, and....Epstein.

As many of us have been saying for years, the rich are doing what they can to return us to, first, the 1950's, and then the 1850's, when a few old rich white men owned it all.

Not sure what on earth good today's United Nations can do, since there is no such thing as holding the larger nations to accounts in regards to international law.
This darkness will spread, I am sure, and the world will once again dissolve into what happened just before both WWI and WWII exploded. All it will take is one nuke, one attempt to kidnap the American President or a member of his family...
The "law" is an illusion, when applied to the rich and powerful, both in regards to people like Musk, and in regards to rich nations like America or China.
And a world without "law" is just a jungle, with nukes.

Even Kafka would be looking at our culture today and scratching his head in dismay.

Says a lot about the state of affairs in America today, it is all for sale, and at the top of the corruption is...fundamentalist christianity.

Trump knows his gang, he knows what will get them to show up at the ballot box in a few months, and it involves hate and the joy of having power, unfettered, to mock those who are sick and dying.

An administration that pardoned the Honduran President for massive crimes involving importing hundreds of tons of cocaine into America now, with a straight face, saying it is perfectly legal for it to kidnap the leader of a foreign country to stand trial in the US. President of Panama Noriega was taken by the US and was convicted of major crimes...so there is precedent.

The Trump cult, and that is clearly what it is, is like the cult that took over Antelope Oregon, only pretending to care about democracy and the rule of law, at its core it has dangerous and corrupt people out to take from the poor to give to...themselves.
So linking a venue long labeled as a John Kennedy effort with the Trump cult can do nothing good for artists, for what the Kennedy Memorial stood for.
It would make for fine public ceremonies if the Dems take over everything in 2028 and all the Trump cult perversions are torn down, as were the Saddam statues.

Misogyny is so embedded into our American culture, into the many fundamentalist religions like Catholicism, Mormonism, much of the Baptist world, that one can only hope we are heading to a future where gender is as relevant as shoe size...
I so wish her well.

Putin, Trump's mass murdering buddy, somehow is seen as a legitimate leader who needs to have his perspectives honored. It is like Ted Bundy running things.

What if it comes out that Trump really has dementia, and he is staying in office because he is so valuable to the far, far right...be is totally a tool of those at his elbow. Think Reagan at the halfway point of his second term...when the country was run from the shadows.
Should be a crime...but these days, the law is the property of the rich, as it is in Russian.

Who owns the large corporations, at the corporate board level, but the very rich and the very...fearful.

It is how almost all Empires fall, from the inside, as great wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands until the inherited wealth oligarchs are the new royalty, and the people stop caring about a government that doesn't care about them.
Think Soviet Union, created out of the chaos of WWII, by Stalin so that Russia would be surrounded by prison states, like East Germany, so Russia would never again face a danger like the Nazis.
Our national independent media is being rapidly being taken down and replaced by propaganda machines for the rich...we humans are frighteningly vulnerable to passionate propaganda.
We elected a clear fascist to be the national leader...twice. Makes me, on my more dark days, mourn, not for the past, but for our future.

The Democratic Party needs to listen and learn, and understand that it must return to being a "big tent" party, honor those who have like views on Constitutional freedoms and demands. That means losing some votes of those who see America as a haven for white nationalists, christian supremacists...and gaining a lot of votes of people who will take the trouble to turn out at election time to support politicians who care about them and their needs and kids.
I am an atheist, but would cheerfully vote for the Christian politician/preacher James Talarico...personal faith helps a person unite with others, and who cares just what rituals that faith includes? We have been divided for far too long by those fundamentalists who love the power and wealth that making everyone bend a knee to them brings to them.

Ah yes, Hoover. One wonders what he would have done to wake one day, as head of the FBI, and found that his President was Trump, a man with a really dark past. It was said that Hoover was not above blackmailing important people, and he would have had a lot to work with with Trump, is my guess.

No, the traditional independent media didn't fail us, many of them had to try and exist under new regimes of super rich fat cat rich men and women who want CNN, or MSNow, or the other independent voices to be stilled, and then loudly be a propaganda tool for the rich, like Musk, and the utterly undemocratic, like Trump.
Big business rules from the corporate boardrooms, and they stand for no elections that the poor and powerless can vote within.

Imagine someone taking Ted Bundy's side and defending his murders, saying we will never have peace if we keep on trying to get those mass murderers to court. Putin is just such a mass murdering psychopath, who invaded a friendly country, killed many thousands of innocent people, so he could steal land. To make peace with him is to say murder if a fine and dandy way to get your way.