Hillary Clinton: If Elected President, I’ll Shut Down 50,000 Public Schools

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton announced during a campaign stop in Iowa that she would shut down nearly 50,000 public schools if elected president. Her comments at the event were broadcast by NBC. “This school district, and these schools throughout Iowa, are doing a better than average job,” Hillary Clinton said during a campaign event at a school in Keota, Iowa, on Tuesday. “Now, I …

Jill Richardson – Make America Great, Like It Was — When?

The holiday season is a time for nostalgia. We watch It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Story, engage in time-honored traditions, and even sing songs about sleighs and sleigh bells. Honestly, when was the last time you rode in a sleigh? I’ve eaten a roasted chestnut (purchased on the streets of Chicago, so I don’t know if there was an open fire …

Steven Rosenfeld – Hillary Clinton’s Big Debate Gaffe: Defending Her Wall Street Donors to 9/11 Terror Attacks

While much of the world’s attention was still focused on the terrorist attacks in Paris, Hillary Clinton made her worst stumble in Saturday night’s Democratic debate in Iowa by defending her cozy relationship with Wall Street contributors as a consequence of being New York’s senator after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The exchange that led to that eyebrow-raising explanation started …

Michael Tomasky – What Ben Carson’s Rise Says About America

How a brilliant man’s profound ignorance became his greatest political asset. So it’s Ben Carson’s moment. He’s overtaken Donald Trump in a CBS/New York Times national poll and he’s ahead in Iowa now with the caucuses just three months away. The Times is writing nice profiles of him full of polite euphemisms like “lack of governing experience.” First we all got used to the idea that it wasn’t insane …

Paul Rosenberg – George W. Bush’s military lies: The real story about the undeniable service gaps he got away with

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein weren’t just journalistic heroes in the normal sense. Their work on Watergate redefined the journalistic world they inhabited, making them more like heroes in the classic mythical sense, as culture-founding figures, whose creation the rest of us merely live inside of. Everyone wanted to be the next Woodward and Bernstein. That stature was underscored by …

Zaid Jilani – The Number of Americans Living on Less Than $2 a Day Is Skyrocketing

The World Bank and other global institutions use a very specific measure to record global poverty rates. They gather data designed to record the number of people in a country who live on less than $2 a day, and then use the information to make a “poverty headcount ratio”— the percentage of people in a country who live under this …

RICK SALUTIN – Revisiting 1930s authoritarianism through Donald Trump

Give this to Donald Trump: he helps us picture how the anti-democratic, right-wing, personality-driven movements of the 1930s came to power. Those movements are usually characterized as fascist though they were diverse, and the term itself is hellishly hard to define. As time passed, they faded into an inexplicably “evil” moment in history which thankfully couldn’t happen here or now. In …

Tom Engelhardt – Where Did the Antiwar Movement Go?

Let me tell you a story about a moment in my life I’m not likely to forget even if, with the passage of years, so much around it has grown fuzzy.  It involves a broken-down TV, movies from my childhood, and a war that only seemed to come closer as time passed. My best guess: it was the summer of …

The Dream of the Machine – John Michael Greer

As I type these words, it looks as though the wheels are coming off the global economy. Greece and Puerto Rico have both suspended payments on their debts, and China’s stock market, which spent the last year in a classic speculative bubble, is now in the middle of a classic speculative bust. Those of my readers who’ve read John Kenneth …

California land mass sinking at record rate as farmers desperately drill new wells to use up ground water – P.A. Watson

The days of abundant water are a distant memory for farmers in California. For the Central Valley, the wells are about to run dry. California’s Central Valley is now reportedly sinking at a rate never seen during the state’s historic drought, and farmers are shouldering part of the blame as they continue to pump the land dry in an effort …